Snooping WPF applications

Rob Relyea has just posted a couple of links to WPF utilities to check out.

Firstly, there's a debugger visualiser for the element tree. Haven't tried it yet, but I do like the idea of these kind of visualisations.

The one I did try was Snoop, which is a very impressive tool to interrogate the visual tree of a running application, and display the tree, plus properties and events. Dead useful - think Spy++ for the 21st century. It's a little intrusive (it injects itself into the application being viewed), but I can live with that.

And that took me on a nice little stroll to see how WPF draws the navigation UI for the Frame class. Starting with this incredibly in-depth article (far too good to be simply a blog post) from the always brilliant Ian Griffiths on how WPF defines the default Template for a control, which then took me to the BAML decoder plugin for Reflector, which showed me the XAML for the resources in PresentationFramework.Aero.dll, which opened my eyes to the very nifty way that WPF handles resources and Templates and how a control's visuals can be made up with other controls. I like this WPF thing.