We live in an age where product age always seem to require a “hook.”.  Whether it’s Microsoft putting either “Visual” or “MS” in front of every name or the ubiquitous “iCrap” you can’t avoid, it’s refreshing to find an application that is not only state-of-the-art but is simply named.

Snoop is one such program.  It snoops.  More than anything else out there, it lets you drill-down into the visual tree in a WPF application.

I could go on and on about it, but seriously.  If you’re doing any development in WPF, any serious development, you need this application.  Even if you’re just trying to understand WPF more, Snoop will expose WPF’s way of doing things more than anything you may ever find.  You just have to see it to understand what I mean.

Popularity: 14%

Originally included with the Windows .NET 3.0 SDK, XamlPad has been extensively updated and is now in version 4.0 under the name XamlPadX 4.0.  Most people will still refer to it as XamlPad though, me included.

To say that XamlPad is helpful for writing and testing Xaml code is akin to saying that a spoon is helpful for eating soup.  You can do it without it, but it’ll take longer and it’ll probably be messy.

But why?  Why would you want to use that when you have a perfectly good editor in Visual Studio?  Good question, I’m glad you asked.

Allow me to take the food analogy a bit further.  Let’s say that you’re a chef.  Come on.  Sayyyy it!  Ok, good.  You’re a chef.  You spend your day making the finest sauces using complex flavors and ingredients.  Yes, I know a saucier technically isn’t a chef, but that’s a subject for another blog, now stop interrupting.

Let’s suppose (saying in my Carl Sagan voice) that you came up with an idea for a new truffle and saffron sauce you want to serve at your restaurant.  Well, you’re a good chef so you’re confident that it’ll be great.  But you also know that it’s an expensive experiment.  The fresh black truffles you want to use are $60 an ounce and the saffron is $63 an ounce.  Even though you know you’ll be able to get it right, you really don’t have the time nor the money to make a full meal, or even the entire dish that would use the sauce if you make a mistake.  So, like any smart chef, you’d make it in a small quantity to get the proportions right first.  This saves you time and potentially a considerable amount of money.

XamlPadX is like that small saucepan.  It allows you to quickly and easily try out your Xaml code without having to make a project with Visual Studio.  It’s fast and it works.

If you’re not using it, then you aren’t as efficient as you should be, it’s really that simple.

Popularity: 26%