windows forms inspector, by click

Question

I am wanting to make an inspector of sorts for a windows app. so that I can fire it up (from inside the app itself) - it will give me a crosshair maybe and I can click on an item in a form/usercontrol - button, list or some such and it will return me the clicked controls name and maybe the form in which it sits. so ideally I wouldn't have to dynamically add a click to absolutely everything in the form I am viewing, and catch the item from that..

presumably this is possible? could someone maybe give me a pointer or 2 any help greatly appreciated

thanks

nat

Answer 1

Have you already seen the Hawkeye? This should work for any general application, including Winforms. For WPF there is a special application called Snoop. Both tools are open source so you can look into their code if you want to implement something on your own.

Answer 2

The nuget package WinForm.Inspector.Tool is probably the best choice out there right now.