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As a “hardcore” WinForms programmer from a Win32 background I have always used Spy++ to understand what my applications are doing at the UI level including:

  • Seeing what events the controls are sending to each other.
  • Seeing the control tree at run time
  • Finding the control that is drawing part of the display

I then often search for the control name in the source code, very useful when you have to change the UI on a large application you don’t know well.

So how do I do the same with a WPF application?

(You may assume I have access to the source code of the WPF application if needed, however I rather the utility worked without the need for the applications source code.)

Thanks for the answers, I have just searched for “Snoop” in StackOverflow and found a few questions/answers with lists of WPF tools.

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Ian Ringrose
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2 Answers2

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Yes, you can use Snoop. It is exactly like Spy++ for WPF.

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Lennart
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japf
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  • ++ Snoop's my favourite too. There's others, but they aren't as good as snoop. If you're programming silverlight then there's Silverlight Spy: http://silverlightspy.com/silverlightspy/download-silverlight-spy/ – Rob Fonseca-Ensor Nov 04 '09 at 10:05
  • Snoop is totally awesome. +1 I also want to point anyone who looks at this question/answer to effort I've done with Snoop at http://snoopwpf.codeplex.com. I have added interop support, 64-bit support, WPF 4.0 support and more. See my blog for more info too: http://www.cplotts.com/2009/12/08/snoop-now-with-64-bit-support-and-more/ – cplotts Apr 01 '10 at 19:22
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Note: Present post is based on Web Archive, and the original page is not currently available as of 2018/07/12!

I prefer Snoop, but also wanted to point out Mole, which is a Visual Studio debugger visualizer for WPF elements:

enter image description here

T.Todua
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Kent Boogaart
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    I use Mole. But it doesn't work if you debug a partial trust app (XBAP for example), you have to switch to full trust... – Massimiliano Apr 01 '10 at 19:20
  • Someone made it on [GitHub](https://github.com/Oceanware/Mole-Visualizer-For-VS-2019), but source is not open, so i don't like that fact. – T.Todua Jul 20 '20 at 13:28