UI Automating a VB6 application from .NET - vb6

Question

For the last few days i have been trying to figure out the best way to get AutomationElement for a specific control in a vb6 application.
My initial way of doing so was by doing a search with the following condition:
new PropertyCondition(AutomationElement.NameProperty, controlName)
I was under the assumption that this was working correctly for about a week in a little test VB6 application.
but i few days ago i realized something... when i dragged a vb6 textbox into the form, the 'Name' property and 'Text' property were both set to 'Text1'
So when i searched with:
new PropertyCondition(AutomationElement.NameProperty, 'Text1')
it return the correct element, but if i then went and set the 'Text' property to '' the same search would bring nothing back.
Question: Has anyone found a way to get a AutomationElement based on a the VB6 control name
What i have tried:
getting the MSAA equivalent interface and looking at the 'Name' property - Result: ''
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd318490%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
getting the control based on other properties (AutomationId, RuntimeId) - Result: AutomationId - not all controls seem to have this property available - RuntimeId - changes each time the app runs
I have looked at alot of different sites the main one is listed below - while some say they have manage to get it working - i don't believe i can see how they do it.. or i just dont understand it :$
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brianmcm/archive/2006/01/17/getting-the-winforms-id-of-a-control.aspx
While i have access to the demo app, i will not access to the production app as that has been created by a third party.
What i plan on doing from here is to get the Automation element based on their position on the form..
Thank you

Answer 1

Can't comment due to low rep. Do you absolutely HAVE to have an AutomationElement?
You may want to look at invoking [user32.dll] (http://pinvoke.net/default.aspx/user32.EnumChildWindows). Look at FindWindowEx, GetWindow, EnumWindows, EnumChildWindows, GetWindowText, etc.
You need the handle of the parent window, so you can use this loop to get it. From there you can use the other functions to get the information you need about the control.
IntPtr hWnd = IntPtr.Zero;
foreach(var process in System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcesses())
if(condition)
hWnd = process.Handle;
Comment with the exact information you need out of the VB6 window, and I'll give you better code.

Answer 2

You can use the relational position of the AutomationElement in a specific Window (or any other container for that matter), in order to detect it. For example, if you have 5 TextBox AutomationElements in your main window, and you're certain that the order will not be changing, you could create a PropertyCondition on the TextBox class name, and then use the FindAll method to return a collection of AutomationElements and iterate through it, querying the BoundingRectangle property to find out which is the lowest one (or middle, or any other position, for that matter).
I would create a helper method that would return a Dictionary<int,AutomationElement> with the key being the visual position of the AutomationElement, and the value being the AutomationElement itself.
This way you can avoid using a specific Point on your screen (any window size change or element positioning will easily break your code) while not being bound to the AutomationId property.