We recently started a desktop client app for one of our clients. Being a .NET shop, we naturally picked WPF over others for two main reasons: 1) WinForms is practically dead and 2) WPF can target broader platform versus WinRT/Universal Apps. WPF is a great framework; the separation between UI and code-behind code is akin to ASP.NET MVC’s Razor. The biggest pain point, however, is not being able drill down on UI code the way web developers could inspect HTML, CSS and JavaScript inside a browser. It’s a such a huge problem.

While browsing MSDN, I was blown away that such functionality now exists in Visual Studio 2015. The video discusses two of the XAML’s UI debugging tools: Live Visual Tree and Live Property Explorer. If you’re a web developer, you can pretty much guess how these tools behave: inspect your element hierarchy while the application is running. I’ve embedded the video below. Enjoy!