Hidden WPF: Secrets for Creating Great Applications in Windows Presentation Foundation

Tools for Debugging

When working with XAML data-binding—or, more generally, with data-bound controls, it can be difficult to discover errors that prevent an application from displaying or managing data correctly. For instance, think of a control being data-bound to a property with an incorrect name due to case, or a control’s DataContext being assigned to an invalid collection. In this section, I’ll talk about tools to help developers discover these kinds of problems.

WPF Tracing

An interesting feature introduced back in WPF 4 is WPF tracing, which allows for retrieving detailed debugging information—very useful when you need to solve data-binding problems and XAML-related problems in general. You enable tracing by selecting Tools > Options > ...