Managed version of the Spy ++ Tool?

Question

More recently, I needed an application like Spy ++ for some debugging of the .NET UI. I found an old MSDN article with a sample that does things similarly, but this has stopped working in newer versions of the .NET Framework.

Does anyone know / write an application that imitates the behavior of Spy ++ and works in managed applications (rather, shows managed events / properties) and works on the new .NET Framework, up to 4.0?

Answer 1

I can recommend UISpy , a spy utility that uses UI Automation to transparently track simple Win32 applications, as well as Windows Forms or WPF . It's a bit hard to find UISpy, but I only downloaded the executable from http://andrewtokeley.net/archive/2009/09/15/uispy-ndash-download-it-here.aspx - it works great

For .NET applications using Windows Forms and WPF, the application uses .NET reflection to display a huge number of properties for objects.

Answer 2

For winforms applications, you can still use Spy ++, as usual.

For WPF applications, take a look at this link . It talks about a tool called snoop. With this tool you can watch the WPF application.

As a side note, I couldn't get it to work, although

Answer 3

The Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 8.1 includes a tool called "Inspect Objects" , which I believe is intended to replace Spy ++.