A few months ago I started to work on a Silverlight project. It was a business-line application, pretty much standard of that type. It was my first project in Silverlight. Anyway, soon I found this great tool called Silverlight Spy. It’s a tool for runtime inspection of Silverlight applications, something like Firebug but only for Silverlight. I was impressed with the software since it was very powerful. The tool costs around 99 EUR, which is not much for the value you get. However, as a passionate developer, I like to develop my own tools (during my free time of course:)). It was then the idea of similar open-source tool was born. I decided to develop a proof-of-concept application called Silverlight Buddy(now thinking of renaming it to Silverlight Inspector). Here’s the what I have done by now:
- Intercepting Silverlight application before it’s displayed in browser
- Injection of custom code logic into an Silverlight application
- Solved communication between Silverlight application and Silverlight Buddy tool. (both using COM and JavaScript)
- Support for hosting DLR inside Silverlight applications (Just like in Silverlight Spy)
- Very basic “Inspect Element”-like functionality
The app is not stable since it is intended only to be a proof-of-concept, written in a quick-and-dirty way. But as you can see, all the major issues/parts have been solved. There is still a huge amount of work to be done in order to make it a usable application. Now,I have never run open-source project, and to be honest, I don’t have time to. That’s why I thought there was somebody out there willing to continue to work on the project. I will probably be a committer myself, but don’t have time to devote fully to the project. If somebody is interested please write a comment.
Here are some screenshots of the app so far.
Notice the red border around “Search” textbox, it represents “Inspect Element” functionality as you move your mouse over the elements.
I hope someone will be willing to continue the work on this project so the effort I have made so far will not be wasted.
