Working on the Silverlight Spy Roadmap
The initial version of Silverlight Spy was released to the web on September 16th, 2007. A lot has changed ever since. Silverlight 2 Beta 1, Beta 2, RC0 and RTW were made available and the Spy itself has undergone some major changes. Silverlight Spy is a stable (although not yet perfect) product containing a lot of features and tools aimed at helping you develop that great Silverlight application.
Silverlight Spy is being used by an enthusiastic and ever-growing number of Silverlight developers all over the world. Some examples of great feedback; Chris Koenig posted a review back in August 2008, Greg Duncan is a follower and Scott Barns discovered the Spy recently. And there are more happy users, try a search for Silverlight Spy on twitter for example.
Roadmap
Silverlight Spy is a BETA product and will be for a while. Right now I am busy creating a formal Silverlight Spy roadmap and your feedback is welcome. Among others I have the following planned (in no particular order):
- Support for (custom) attached dependency properties
- Increase the number of supported event types in the Event Monitor
- Support for Popup UI content
- Improve usability by integrating with Visual Studio.NET
- Various UI improvements (such as dockable panes for multi-monitor use)
- AddIn framework (possibly based on the Managed Extensibility Framework) to allow developers to extend the functionality of Silverlight Spy
- Extend UI Automation support by impementing pattern invocation
- A XAML preview tab with a scalable and rotatable view of single UI elements
- Search extensions (one should be able to search for anything, not just element names)
- Application Evaluator. Evaluate a Silverlight application and provide information such as whether it is using best practices, has memory issues, etc.
A word on Reflector integration
This is one of my favorite features; Silverlight Spy uses Red Gate's Reflector to decompile Silverlight assemblies. Unfortunately the integration is achieved by using an undocumented Reflector API. I had the pleasure to talk to someone over at Red Gate who pointed out that they might update this undocumented API in the future without warning. Whenever this happens, the Spy will fail to load Reflector. I do need to investigate what other options are available for integrating Reflector in the Spy.
Your turn
What other feature is missing or what bug needs to be addressed? You do have an influence on the Silverlight Spy roadmap. Have your say and post a comment or contact me directly.
On a final note, I am committed to keeping Silverlight Spy the best 3rd party Silverlight development tool available. In order to do so, I do need your feedback. Whether its good or bad, please let me know what you think of Silverlight Spy and how you use it in your daily life.
Thanks
3 Comments
Rodrigo Pinto said:
Hi there,
beeing a developer for ever, i just lov your tool!
I use it on a daily base.
Ive got some questions:
Why SilverSpy wont detect Silverlight1.0 applications?
Jus been on 10k contest with your tool, and i cant get any XAP with it. Feature or Bug?
Best Regards and thanx!
Rodrigo Pinto, SharePoint Solution Architect
(Scoutman, a portuguese connection)
Andrew said:
How about adding a profiling tool?
asif said:
Hi Koen,
To Identify Silverlight Pages from a external C# program
I fetch the HTMLDocument2 type of DOM for a Webpage(Silverlight).
When I cast the document object (IHTMLDocument2) to Sytem.Windows.Browser.HTMLDocument type, it throws an error can you please give some pointers to it.
Thanks!
Asif