Few weeks ago I went to the Office DevCon down here in Australia organized by Microsoft. There was a session on "SharePoint Developers Tips and Tricks" and the presenter showed our own SharePoint Spy as the free tool you can use to analyse your SharePoint environment. I noticed that he didn't mention all nice features of the application and here I am blogging about them.

The first great thing is that SharePoint Spy not only shows you the object public properties but it also can show you the private properties. You just need to check this "Raw View" push button at the top and you will now see even those properties that are not exposed through public members. Nice err?

To reset the view simply reselect the object.

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

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

Finally one of the best features - comparing the properties of two objects. Select any object, right click and then go "Compare this item with ...". Then you will need to select the other object by left clicking on it, then right click and go "... compare with this item". After you do this the SharePoint Spy will show the properties of the two objects side by side so you can easily compare them.

Hope this helped you get a better use of the SharePoint Spy.