Managed version of Spy++ Tool?

Ran Sagy picture Ran Sagy · Feb 1, 2011 · Viewed 7.4k times · Source

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

Frerich Raabe picture Frerich Raabe · Feb 1, 2011

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.