If like me you’re curious about how big WPF applications are made, you probably tried to use Snoop to inspect the visual tree of Visual Studio 2010 Beta2. And you probably had a problem because Snoop wasn’t able to detect the devenv process of VS2010:

I wasn’t sure about the cause of this problem, but I grab the source of Snoop and took a look at the code that list the available window:

?View Code CSHARP
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public void Refresh() {
	this.windows.Clear();
 
	foreach (IntPtr windowHandle in NativeMethods.ToplevelWindows) {
		WindowInfo window = new WindowInfo(windowHandle, this);
		if (window.IsValidProcess && !this.HasProcess(window.OwningProcess))
			this.windows.Add(window);
	}
 
	if (this.windows.Count > 0)
		this.windowsView.MoveCurrentTo(this.windows[0]);
}

I setup a breakpoint to find out what was wrong and discover that the window.IsValidProcess failed with the VS2010 process. Because I just wanted to check if it was the only reason why Snoop wasn’t able to inspect it, I hack the code to remove this test:

?View Code CSHARP
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public void Refresh() {
	this.windows.Clear();
 
	foreach (IntPtr windowHandle in NativeMethods.ToplevelWindows) {
		WindowInfo window = new WindowInfo(windowHandle, this);
		if (/*window.IsValidProcess &&*/ !this.HasProcess(window.OwningProcess))
			this.windows.Add(window);
	}
 
	if (this.windows.Count > 0)
		this.windowsView.MoveCurrentTo(this.windows[0]);
}

And it’s working:

vs2010-snoop

Happy exploration with Snoop :-)