As I’ve mentioned before, I love user interface spying utilities and often find myself championing their use.
Today, I got a message from someone requesting the modifications we made to wfSpy. I’ve always wanted to publish them back to the community and tried to do so by contacting the original author. However, I never got any response.
wfSpy stands for Windows Forms Spy and so it is a spying utility for Windows Forms applications (and specifically for .NET 2.0 and forward). It is similar to Hawkeye, but is easier to use … and doesn’t have quite as much functionality.
We made several modifications to it but the notable two are as follows.
First off, a colleague (Don Kackman) of mine added the crosshairs ability. Take a look at the main window that comes up when you launch it.
If you click on the magnifying glass, drag it on top of a Windows Forms control, and release … the wfSpy properties window will then come up.
The wfSpy properties window shows all the properties on the control that you just selected … and not only can you view them … but you can also modify them (at runtime) as well!
The second notable change that we added was synchronizing the tree view (on the wfSpy’s main window) such that the control you selected … is the active ‘window’ selected.
This is extremely useful in the case where you have controls that are hiding other controls … and there is no way to select those hidden (or covered) controls with the crosshairs. In this case, you use the crosshairs to select the control you can select, and then you close the properties window and use the tree view to select the control you want. I would often turn the Visible property of a control on and off … to help me navigate through the tree of controls.
When utilizing the tree view synchronization feature … make sure you have a refreshed version of the current controls in the tree view … by clicking the ‘Refresh’ button on wfSpy’s main window. Otherwise, the synchronization logic might not be able to find the control (in the tree view) you selected.
So, without further adieu … here is the source code.
Hope it helps!
p.s.
Leave a comment if it does help you … I always enjoy hearing that my efforts have actually paid dividends. 
p.s.s.
I have just (May 15th, 2012) pushed the sourced code to GitHub after receiving yet another request for the .NET 4.0 version.
It is at the following location: https://github.com/cplotts/wfSpy
