Managed version of Spy++ Tool?

Question

Awhile ago, I needed a Spy++ like application for some .NET UI debugging. I found an old MSDN article with a sample that does things similarly, But that stopped working in newer .NET Framework versions.

Does anyone know of/wrote an application that mimics Spy++ behavior and works on Managed applications (rather, shows Managed events/properties) and works on newer .NET Frameworks, up to 4.0?

Answer 1

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

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

Answer 2

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

For WPF applications take a look to this link . It talks about a tool called snoop. With this tool you can look into a WPF application.

As a side note, I haven't been able to make it work though

Answer 3

The Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 8.1 includes a tool named "Inspect Objects" that I believe is intended as a Spy++ replacement.