These tools enable you to inspect the visual tree of your running WPF application as well as the properties on any element in the tree, turning the difficult challenge of picking apart how properties override each other and figuring out winning behavior into a straightforward task that’s done at runtime, when everything is taken into account. Visual Studio integrates these UI debugging tools directly into the debugging experience so they fit seamlessly into the development cycle.

Today’s announcement brings support for WPF; we’ll release support for Windows Store apps in a future update.

Let’s take a closer look.

The Live Visual Tree is the first of the two key pieces of the UI debugging tools:

You can use the Live Visual Tree to:

Clicking the properties button in the Live Visual Tree or selecting “Show Properties” in the context menu of any element brings up the Live Property Explorer.

The Live Property Explorer:

Selecting elements in the Visual Tree is easy when you know the structure of the app. When you don’t know the minutia of the layout, the Live Visual Tree also provides an in-app element selection tool. When enabled, mouse events are intercepted by the UI debugging tools, allowing direct selection of any element simply by clicking on them.

The In-App selection provides two feedback modes for selecting elements:

These tools, as part of Visual Studio 2015 CTP 6, give you an early glimpse into our new XAML debugging experience, but they’re not finished yet. Here’s a few things we’re hoping to add as development continues:

Additionally, there are some known limitations in the CTP, including the lack of CLR properties and support for editing collections, but the team is working on including these in the RTM update. If you’re interested in the specifics about how these tools work, as well as the ways we’ve extended WPF to support the UI Debugging tools, you may find this article on Expanding WPF for UI Debugging interesting.

We’d love for folks to try these tools out. Tell us what you like, what you don’t like and what you think is missing. The product team is still eager to hear your feedback and we’re grateful for any comments that folks are willing to share. If you have feedback on the UI debugging tools, you can comment here, post suggestions on UserVoice, and report bugs on the Connect site. From here, it’s all up to you.