Category: WPF

Problems, Problems

The above blog post title is supposed to be kind of a joke. I keep telling people I’m funny. Snoop supposedly has been supporting WPF 4.0 for some time now. Unfortunately, however, there were times where (1, 2) WPF 4.0 applications weren’t showing up in the App Chooser.

In one situation, PresentationFramework.dll wasn’t showing up in the list of loaded modules for the application being Snooped. So, I simply started searching for any of the following assemblies: PresentationFramework.dll, PresentationCore.dll, or wpfgfx_v0400.dll.

But, that didn’t work in all situations.

For sometimes, PresentationFramework.dll shows up as PresentationFramework.ni.dll which I believe is the Ngen(ed) version of the assembly. At other times, it isn’t wpfgfx_v0400.dll that shows up in the list of modules, but wpfgfx_v0300.dll. The former is the milcore for WPF 4.0 and the latter is the milcore for WPF 3.5.

At this point, I just searched for the roots of all these names, i.e. PresentationFramework, PresentationCore, and wpfgfx.

But, again … that didn’t work in all situations. Humility, is a virtue … humility is a virtue.

For some reason, at times, these modules show up in lower case. Don’t ask me why. If someone can shed light on this, please do. So, I’m now searching for the roots of these assemblies in a case-insensitive way. Granted, I probably should have seen that one coming.

Snoop v2.6.1

Now announcing Snoop v2.6.1!

Snoop v2.6.1 fixes these issues and others. After yet another fellow experienced this problem and since more people are going WPF 4.0 all the time … I figured it was time for a release.

This release also contains some usability improvements from fellow Snoop aficionado, Dan Hanan. In particular:

1. You can now delve properties by double clicking on the name.
2. You can now modify the filter sets to contain what you wish to be filtered.
3. You can now use the mouse wheel to modify property values.

I also want to say that I have a whole bunch of things lined up for integration into Snoop, but have been struggling to find time. For example, another fellow added the ability to capture some hi-res screen shots from Snoop. So, there is definitely going to be a vNext for Snoop … and hopefully soon.

Snoop Tips & Tricks

For a while now, I’ve been contemplating a blog series on Snoop where I highlight different tips and tricks, and in general, how to use Snoop. And with this release, I’m going to kick it off with the most important one of them all: the Ctrl-Shift Mouse Over trick.

Today I got a question about whether Snoop supports XBAPs. Actually, this is something I’ve been meaning to look into for a while.

So, I took the two necessary seconds to create a test XBAP project and tried Snooping. It didn’t work. When launching Snoop after running the XBAP, you see PresentationHost.exe in the App Chooser (PresentationHost.exe is the process that the browser launches in the case of an XBAP).

However, trying to Snoop it (clicking the binoculars) … results in … nothing, not even an error.

Now, the person asking … pointed out a Josh Smith’s blog post on the matter … where he discusses three tips for working with XBAPs … one of which is that Snoop doesn’t work, but that Mole does. In order to get Mole to work, however, you must (at least temporarily) make your XBAP a full trust application.

Hmm. That got me thinking. Yes, I know that is dangerous.

A lot of my efforts with Snoop to date … have revolved around getting edge case scenarios to work … and I have modified the start up process significantly. So, I thought, I should quickly check to see if Snoop now works … as long as I change the XBAP to a full trust application.

And … woohoo … it works!

So, all you need to do is go to the Project Properties window, navigate to the Security tab, and check ‘This is a full trust application’.

Hope that helps, and yeah, Snoop rules!

p.s.

I did also verify (while writing up this post) that neither Snoop 1.0 (Pete Blois’ original version) nor Snoop 2.0 (Pete Blois’ newer stylized version) worked with XBAPs.

Haven’t I already said that the community has just been awesome in regards to Snoop?

Well, here is another piece of evidence!

The other day, a developer, Bruno Martinez, from Uruguay contacted me and wanted to contribute to Snoop by making it so that there was only 1 version, instead of the 4 currently required at that point.

If you recall …

1. You needed a version for WPF 3.5 and 32-bit.
2. You needed a version for WPF 3.5 and 64-bit.
3. You needed a version for WPF 4.0 and 32-bit.
4. You needed a version for WPF 4.0 and 64-bit.

Yuck! Of course, it was better than not being able to Snoop in those situations. 🙂

Well, after integrating Bruno’s changes … you just need:

1. Snoop

Yeah, that’s right. There are no labels! Thank you, Bruno!

I’m obviously tickled by this … since it was a usability nightmare trying to figure out what version you needed to run … but there are host of other fixes/improvements as well. In particular, the Snoop start-up process is much more robust than it used to be and it can handle some fringe cases that it wasn’t able to before.

Please go to https://snoopwpf.codeplex.com for more info, and of course, the download/release area for version 2.6.0.

Happy Snooping!

This is just a quick post to point people to the fact that I have updated Snoop on CodePlex (https://snoopwpf.codeplex.com/) such that it now supports WPF 4.0.

If you try to Snoop a WPF 4.0 application with the WPF 3.5 version, you will get the following error message:

I speculate that this is because there is a brand new CLR with .NET 4.0 (WPF 4.0) applications. Yes, that’s right, a brand new CLR. We haven’t had one of those for a while.

If someone can confirm this or provide a better understanding of why I can’t Snoop WPF 4.0 applications without retargeting Snoop to .NET 4.0 … please shed some light for me.

So, there are now 4, count them, 4 versions of Snoop:

1. Snoop 32-bit for WPF 3.5
2. Snoop 64-bit for WPF 3.5
3. Snoop 32-bit for WPF 4.0
4. Snoop 64-bit for WPF 4.0

You need to use the right version of Snoop in each particular situation … otherwise … thar will be problems, matey!

I have also added another label to the app chooser so that you know which version you currently have up. Take a look … this is what it looks like for the 64-bit/WPF 4.0 version:

Let me know if you have any problems by creating a discussion (or participating in a current one) on the https://snoopwpf.codeplex.com site.

Enjoy and happy Snooping! 🙂

Snoop is now on CodePlex at snoopwpf.codeplex.com

The community reception to my efforts (blog posts: 1, 2, 3) on Snoop have been wonderful. Some like Anvaka have offered additional feature suggestions; others have just encouraged me.

In my last post, a fellow commented asking why it wasn’t up on CodePlex. Well, this was a great suggestion and one that I had actually already considered. That prompted me to email Pete Blois (the original author) for his permission. He graciously gave it and so I then proceeded to put it up there.

It took me a little while, but I now have the initial bits uploaded … that is, the same stuff that is available here at my blog.

Now, there are a bunch of things on the todo list. Most notably, I’ve already modified Snoop so that it works for WPF 4.0 … and definitely want to share that with the world.

So, please be patient, I’ll get to it. Those silly day jobs! 😀

Some Info

If you are going to download the source code and build it, some comments are in order (I’ll put this out at the CodePlex site too).

There are (go to Build->Configuration Manager) 3 solution platforms (x86, x64, Any CPU) and 2 solution configurations (Debug, Release). The x86 platform is for 32-bit, the x64 platform is obviously for 64-bit, but … what is Any CPU?

Well, Any CPU is only around for Blendability. That is, for some odd reason, I couldn’t bring up the Blend designer Snoop’s window unless it was in this configuration. I have intentionally marked the ManagedInjector project to not be built under the Any CPU configuration. Since Any CPU will run as 32-bit on 32-bit operating systems and as 64-bit on 64-bit operating systems, using Any CPU will likely cause a mismatch (and a headache :)) with the ManagedInjector dll.  The project which builds the ManagedInjector.dll is a C++ project and there isn’t an Any CPU setting for those (they can only be specifically built to Win32 or x64).

Or, in other words, make sure you switch into another platform, before you build or the build will fail.

Here’s a chart for quick reference:

Call to Action

If you have a feature request or want to be involved somehow (maybe as a contributor), please don’t hesitate to contact me.

For near future though, I’m going to keep the project closed until I can change the copyright info to Ms-PL and clean up the code a bit.

Thanks

Finally, I want to publicly thank Pete Blois for first creating this awesome tool and for giving us the permission to get it going on CodePlex. A big thanks Pete!

The other day I was rebuilding an application such that it would specifically target the x86 platform … solely because I wanted to Snoop it.

I’ve done this many, many times because it is the only way I’ve been able to Snoop applications on my Windows 7 64-bit operating system. And, I thought, “Boy, this is stupid. I should be able to build a 64-bit version of Snoop such that I don’t have to do this anymore.”

And that is exactly what I did.

Now … presenting Snoop 32-bit!

And Snoop 64-bit!

Here are the binaries for the 32-bit version and here are the binaries for the 64-bit version.

(The binaries are now (see posts: 1, 2) up on CodePlex. Please go download it from there as those binaries will contain the latest and greatest bits.)

It was rather a simple matter really. I just needed to change all the project configurations so that they targeted the x64 platform … for the x64 version of Snoop … and all the project configurations so that they targeted the x86 platform … for the x86 version of Snoop.

This was so easy and worked so nicely … that I searched the internet to see if anyone had done this already … and I found Dan Hanan’s nice post on the matter.

The problem, though, was that he did it for original version of Snoop … and not the nicely styled and improved version that Pete Blois currently is making available since property editing was originally (still?) broken in that version. However, he also had several nice usability features that I was drooling over and wanted for my very own. 😀 And I, of course, have already fixed the property editing issue in my version (see previous posts: 1, 2) with a little help from Mark Kharitonov (see this forum post for more info on that).

So, I emailed him, got his permission to integrate those changes, and promptly did so. I also added a few improvements myself.

The Improvements

Here is what has been improved (over and above Pete Blois’ current version):

I chose not to integrate a couple of Dan Hanan’s changes. First, I did not integrate the ‘indexer delve’. Well, actually I did, but then noticed that Pete Blois’ new version already allowed you to delve into items in a collection … and so I backed it out.

Second, I did not integrate the ‘use 2nd monitor if present’ feature. I liked that feature but thought that I would try to improve upon it by remembering the position and size of all the windows … regardless of the number of monitors. So, with a little help from this StackOverflow question and this MSDN sample … that is what I did. It seems to work nicely. Let me know if you have any problems with it.

Snoop(ing) Visual Studio 2010

Finally, ever since I’ve installed Visual Studio 2010, I’ve wanted to take a peek under the covers with Snoop (remember … Microsoft used WPF in this latest version of Visual Studio). I originally thought I couldn’t Snoop it … because it was running as a 64-bit application and I only had a 32-bit version of Snoop.

So, when I got the 64-bit version of Snoop going, I quickly tried Snooping Visual Studio 2010. No luck! Bringing up task manager, I quickly remembered that Visual Studio runs as a 32-bit application on 64-bit operating systems. See this post by Rico Mariani for more info.

As I have recently been invited into the WPF Disciples group, I posed the question there. Imagine my surprise to find out that devenv.exe was manually being filtered out (since Visual Studio 2008 would load WPF assemblies … but Snoop would fail since Visual Studio 2008 wasn’t built with WPF).

That gave me quite the chuckle. Or, more like, duh! So, promptly removed that and Snoop(ed) Visual Studio 2010 to my delight (check out the red Snoop adorner):

And, of course, the Snoop AppChooser:

And, finally, the main Snoop user interface:

I think that is so cool. Ok, I know … I need mental help. 😀

The Source Code

In the past, I have not released the source code since I have wanted to get Pete’s permission before I do so. I actually met him at PDC 2009 this year. I brought up the fact that I had modified Snoop to handle interop scenarios … but I forgot to ask him about the source code!

There are so many changes now … that I think it would be counter-productive to not release it … in case someone else wants to take Snoop even further than I (and Dan and Mark) have. If you do modify it … and take it further … please let me know! I would love the chance to determine whether to integrate the changes into this version.

So, here it is: the source code.

(The source code is now (see posts: 1, 2) up on CodePlex. Please go download it from there as that code will contain the latest and greatest bits.)

Enjoy!

p.s. If you were one of the few who pulled down the binaries immediately after I posted it, then you may not have gotten the Snoop.exe.config file. Unfortunately, in this case, Snoop does not seem to close down all the way (i.e. I had to manually kill it through task manager). You’ll want to get the latest binaries that do include the Snoop.exe.config file … or manually rebuild them yourself with the source code.

An Update

See above (in the table of improvements), but I fixed the installers and integrated a nice idea by Anvaka. All the attached binaries (which should be installers now) and source code have been updated.