Originally published on my old Charteris blog

I first came across DOM explorers\inspectors for web browser DOMs last year and found them an absolute godsend. Any web developer who has never used one get to it! The Firefox DOM inspector ships with the browser and is available if you check the "Developer Tools" option at install time, read more about here. The Internet Explorer one is part of the Web Developer Toolbar and can be installed from here.

When I came to smart client development with WPF I never expected to find something as useful and as revealing as a DOM inspector. Well Pete Blois has done just that. Whilst WPF does not have what you would traditionally refer to as a DOM it does have a potentiialy wide and deep hierarchy of controls making up a UI. Pete's app, called Snoop is a great tool for exploring this hierarchy.

It has helped me understand the internals of the complex WPF UI structures such as Menus as well as debugging my own applications. Download Snoop here