Originally published on my old Charteris blog

Those people who have come to WPF in the last 3 or 4 months are rather spoilt with WPF editing tools like Expression Blend and the editor in Visual Studio (Orcas) release codenamed Cider. However don't forget XamlPad. XAMLPad.exe gets installed as part of the Windows .NET 3.0 SDK and it's a quick and simple way to put together samples and ideas. Some time around Beta 2 of WinFx XamlPad was updated and got the very useful Visual Tree Explorer.

This gives you a read only view of the visual tree and is particularly useful for seeing how some of the standard controls are made up such as ListView and Menu. I have highlighted the "Show\Hide Visual Tree" button and the tree itself below.