A couple years back at the Microsoft Office DevCon conference in Australia in a session on "SharePoint Developers Tips and Tricks," the presenter highlighted our own SharePoint Spy as a great – and free – tool for analyzing your SharePoint environment. While this was some much appreciated free press, he didn't mention all of the other application features. SharePoint Spy continues to be our number one download, and a “Hot Pick” on SharePointreviews.com, and so I thought I’d provide some additional information on the tool.

The first great thing is that SharePoint Spy not only shows you the object’s public properties, but it also shows you the private properties. By selecting the "Raw View" button at the top, SharePoint Spy highlights those properties that are not exposed through public members. 

To reset the view, simply reselect the object.

Another thing which you may not have discovered is that you can use the SharePoint Spy to retrieve the content of text files, including .ASPX pages. You simply need to navigate to the file you are interested in, expand the node, and then select "File Content."

Now you can copy and review the raw content of the .ASPX pages shown in SharePoint Designer.

Finally, one of the best features of SharePoint Spy is to compare the properties of two objects. This is the primary reason why people download the tool – and it’s a pretty cool feature, if we don’t say so ourselves. Select any object, right click, and then click "Compare this item with ..." You will need to select the other object by left clicking on it, followed by a right click, and once again selecting "Compare with this item." Once you follow these directions, SharePoint Spy will show the properties of the two objects side-by-side so that you can easily compare their properties.

We hope you find this information helpful, and it allows you to get more out of your SharePoint Spy download.

If you haven’t done so already, you can download a free copy from our website here.