Favorite WPF Utilities

I’ve compiled this list of WPF utilities that have helped me save time while debugging, profiling, and as a result make development under WPF much more productive and enjoyable:

Snoop

I can’t recommend this enough. Snoop let’s you view a window’s visual tree, glance at an element’s property values, check if there are any data binding errors, and look at a RoutedEvent’s execution path. Indispensable.

Mole

Although I only started using it a few weeks ago, I use it quite a bit. It’s similar to Snoop in that it let’s you view a window’s visual tree and property values, but actually runs inside the Visual Studio debugger as a Visualizer tool. Additionally, it shows you the window’s logical tree and even the XAML where an element was instantiated. Very cool.

WPF Perf

This is actually a collection of profiling tools that Microsoft ships with the .NET 3.0 SDK. Perforator has helped me a number of times to discover where rendering performance bottlenecks were occurring on Jing.

Reflector

An oldie but goodie. Reflector will dissasemble the source for any non-obfuscated assemblies, allowing you to look at an almost 1:1 mapping of 3rd party source code. Not only can you look at the source for classes in an assembly, Reflector will also show all the locations the class was used and its documentation. This has to be my all-time favorite WPF/.NET tool as I’ve used it countless times to look at Microsoft’s code to learn how they implemented certain panels, DependencyProperties, etc.

 Pistachio

EDIT 1/7/2008: I started using Pistachio today after the lead developer, Mike Malinak, recommended it last week. Pistachio shows you the XAML resources that are available in a WPF project, where they’re declared, if they’re used, and where they’re used. To be honest, I think the UI could be improved (such as a tree-view of all the XAML resources instead pressing buttons to manually scroll through each file), but it’s a decent first start. Plus, god knows Visual Studio 2005 desperately needs functionality like this. Kudos to Grant Hinkson for writing this, I look forward to its continued improvement.

So there you have it, these are the utilities that I swear by for my WPF development. What are some of your favorite WPF utilities?

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Tags: debugging, profilers, utilities, WPF

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