Secret Project

Well I said I would reveal the secret project I've been working on. 99% of people won't be interested, but if you're a .NET developer you probably will be very interested. Especially if you do a lot of UI work.

I actually came up with this idea 6 years ago and wrote a fairly successful codeproject article on it, but then I abandoned it. I've since started a new job, and wished I had this tool, so built it.

Enter Event Spy -

Event spy is a development/debugging tool that subscribes to all events a .NET object can raise, it then records when events are raised on the object, and allows you to explore the value of any event arguments.

Event spy works on any event of any object, no matter what the event handler type is. It does this by using a combination of runtime code generation through CodeDOM and Reflection.Emit to compile handlers on the fly.

Usage is pretty simple, just add Event Spy as a reference, then call:

var spy = new EventSpy();
spy.Register(o);

where o is any object. Event spy will then start listening to all events the object exposes, and will pop up a window that shows these events in real time. You can even register more than 1 object at once with event spy.

The reasoning behind event spy is that when you're faced with using a new control or API library it's a massive pain to trawl through documentation to work out what events are available, when they are raised and what gets passed to the handler. With this you can simply register the control or object, and play about with it to work all this out.

Read more: Martin's Blog

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