WPF Development Tools

software developers currently in the field of Windows development have certainly heard of Windows Presentation Foundation or commonly known as WPF. I have been programming with WPF and C# for a little over a year know and have accumulated a few tools along the way to help my development. Here is a list of a few of the tools I use to help you out when learning and using WPF.

Snoop

Snoop is an application which helps visual debugging of WPF applications at runtime. Using snoop is pretty easy. Once installed, just select your current running application which you wish to snoop, and press either one of two buttons. The first button will show a zoom  of your application in which you can visually see how everything is layered.

The second option you have is to view a tree view of all the visual elements in your application. Clicking and highlighting a selection will highlight the UI Element in your application and show a brief thumbnail in the tree view.

This is a great tool to quickly view your application in a 3d level and get answers quick about your visual elements. To read more on their website, visit http://blois.us/Snoop or thier CodePlex page here.

VS10x Code Map

Visual Studio code map is a Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 extension to list all the methods and class in a given code file. If you use regions, it gets even better. I know when even transversing small code files, a little organization would come in very handy. What VS10x Code Map does is organize this all for you, and add a few extra features to make your life that much easer.

The features include

  • Code Visualization
  • Code Collapsing and Sync
  • Persistent History
  • Highlighting Favorite Items
  • Filtering
  • Color themes
  • Customizable

VS10xCode Map can be found here, and is currently free of cost.

Pistachio

Pistachio is a tool used to quickly graphically view the csproj file of a project and determine what resources are and are not being used by that project and where they are called. This program is very lightweight and easy to use. All one has to do is open up the executable and point to the csproj file in which they would like to open. It then appears with all the references. This is a great application and deserves a look since its free and can be found here.

 

Let me know what you all think of these great applications and what applications you all use for your WPF development.

Jacob Saylor

Software developer in Kentucky

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: