We are developing a rather large WPF based application and would like to include some automated UI testing in our test suite (which already contains a number of unit tests).

The UI Automation Framework from Microsoft partly sounds like a perfect fit for programatically launching and interacting with the application in a test setup. However, I've struggled to find solid references for samples and experiences with the technology, the articles and small samples available on MSDN is not enough to convince me that it is a solid choice.

So, does anybody have real world experiences using the UI Automation Framework in their test suite? What are the caveats and the gotchas? Any best practices when written tests scripts, can you "record and replay" to a scriptable format, how much should you facilitate the testing from the application, how did you incorporate it in the automatic build? Should we be looking in another direction than the UI Automation Framework?

Feel free to post you experiences here or link to some good references I might have missed