Silverlight Spy 3 Beta available
As of today Silverlight Spy 3 Beta is available for evaluation. Silverlight Spy 3 is a major rework of the existing Silverlight Spy 2. The concept is stil the same but a lot of things have changed. In this blog post a short overview of what's new to Silverlight Spy and some things you should be aware of. I will blog more details on Silverlight Spy 3 in the coming weeks.
What you need to know
In no particular order a number of things you should be aware of:
- This initial version is a public beta and will cease to function on August 31st, 2009.
- Silverlight Spy 3 happily co-exists with Silverlight Spy 2. No need to uninstall Silverlight Spy 2.
- Silverlight Spy 3 requires Silverlight 3 RTW. If you do not have/want to upgrade to Silverlight 3 RTW, do not install Silverlight Spy 3.
- Silverlight Spy 3 features a proper unhandled exception dialog with reporting functionality. If you happen to run into any exception please do send in those reports. It will help improve Silverlight Spy.
- The network monitor is not available yet in Silverlight Spy 3. It simply didn't make the deadline. Rest assured, it will be added in a subsequent release.
- By popular demand: Silverlight Spy 3 is available as a redistributable setup package only. The ClickOnce deployment model has been dropped.
What's new
A short list of things that are new to Silverlight Spy 3. Please note that this list is not complete by far.
- Simplified UI with floating view windows. Works great in dual monitor environments
- Initially comes with 10 different views on your application, more views are scheduled.
- Significant updates to underlying model, allows for easily adding plugins (more on this later)
- New DLR shell: interactively execute dynamic language code (I am very excited about this one)
- Standalone Object Browser (moved from XAP Package view)
- Modify files and folders in the isolated storage
- Filter on names in property grid
- Context sensitive object commands
- More detailed UI property grid with support for SL3 features
- Performance Monitor supports new SL3 Analytics class
- And more, much more..
Get your copy of Silverlight Spy 3.
So, what do you think?
Published: July 26, 2009
Great Work! Thanks for sharing.
Ric
I downloaded it, pointed it at a site and I was able to see everything including the source code. So umm yeah it works great :)
Great now we have to obfuscate our sl apps. can you also write an obfuscator as well. (a great money making idea - write a tool to undress an app and then write another tool to prevent undressing an app from your tool. Except you charge for the other tool).
Don't shoot the messenger! You should not blame Silverlight Spy. Bytecode-compiled apps are by nature very easy to decompile. Silverlight Spy is just showing you what you are exposing to the world and you can use the Spy to do something about it. A developer must be aware of the fact that once an application is out on the interwebs, people may try to hack it for their own good.
Obfuscating your SL app is always a good idea if you want to protect your source code (to a certain level that is). If you are really concerned about your IP, you should reconsider using client-side technologies, such as Silverlight.
absolutely right you can easily do next:
- look at the page source code
- find link to xap file
- put it in address bar
- download it
- unzip it
- start Reflector
Done :)
Thanks for updating the SPY!
Somehow it doesn't work with my Silverlight 3 application.
I load it and it displays on the left preview page, but on the right there's an error message: Failed to create Spy in Silverlight AppDomain.
What's the problem here?
Thanks!
flo: please open the output log (view > output log) and see what error details are in there. upcoming slspy updates will provide some better error feedback
Hey Koen, my output logs sys:
03:24:50 [Application] Silverlight application loaded
03:24:55 [Application] Found a Silverlight 3 RTW application
03:24:56 [Application] Failed to load Spy for Silverlight application.
Reason: Spy not available in Silverlight AppDomain
Thanks for your help!
I have exactly the same error as Flo reported already.
I use SL project which generates test page in runtime.. May be that is the problem?