Build Your Own Spy Utility

In support of my talk on Saturday, I wanted to publish another little bit of code that I have found extremely useful. There are a lot of spy utilities out there: Spy++, ManagedSpy, UISpy, etc. They all work OK, but I have found on many occasions that I wanted my spy utility to do X, Y or Z.

So, I built my own spy utility. Start with this form, and add any spy functionality that you need to it. Here is the code:

using System.Drawing;
using System.Windows.Forms;
namespace RecipeBox.Tests.GUI_Tests
{
    public class Spy : Form
    {
        readonly SplitContainer _splitContainer = new SplitContainer {Dock = DockStyle.Fill};
        readonly TreeView _controlTree = new TreeView {Dock = DockStyle.Fill};
        readonly PropertyGrid _properties = new PropertyGrid {Dock = DockStyle.Fill};

        public Spy()
        {
            Size = new Size(640, 480);

            _splitContainer.Panel1.Controls.Add(_controlTree);
            _splitContainer.Panel2.Controls.Add(_properties);
            Controls.Add(_splitContainer);

            _controlTree.NodeMouseClick += (sender, e) => _properties.SelectedObject = e.Node.Tag;
        }

        public Spy(Control rootControl) : this()
        {
            _controlTree.Nodes.Add(GetTreeNode(rootControl));
        }

        private static TreeNode GetTreeNode(Control control)
        {
            var node = new TreeNode(control + " (" + control.Name + ")") {Tag = control};

            foreach (Control childControl in control.Controls)
                node.Nodes.Add(GetTreeNode(childControl));

            return node;
        }
    }
}

And here is how you might use the custom spy:

[Test, Explicit]
public void Spy_On_TestForm()
{
    var testForm = new TestForm();
    testForm.Show();

    var spy = new Spy(testForm);
    spy.Show();

    while (true)
        Application.DoEvents();
}

And this is what it looks like: