{"id":23122,"date":"2015-12-01T13:20:44","date_gmt":"2015-12-01T21:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.xamarin.com\/?p=23122"},"modified":"2015-12-01T13:20:44","modified_gmt":"2015-12-01T21:20:44","slug":"inspect-visualize-and-debug-your-app-live","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/inspect-visualize-and-debug-your-app-live\/","title":{"rendered":"Inspect, Visualize, and Debug Your App Live"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\t\t\t\tWhen you&#8217;re adding the final polish before releasing your mobile app, it&#8217;s easy to get stuck in that dreaded tweak-code-debug-run cycle. For every change that you make, even the simplest ones, you have to relaunch your app on several emulators or devices to ensure it&#8217;s working properly. This is where the brand new Xamarin Inspector comes in to let you inspect, modify, and visualize your application without ever having to pause.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/Screen-Shot-2015-12-01-at-11.16.37-AM-1024x570.png\" alt=\"VS Inspector Live\" width=\"646\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-23133\" \/><\/p>\n<h2>Getting Started<\/h2>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/Inspector-Icon-300x276.png\" alt=\"Inspector Icon\" width=\"150\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-23130\" \/>It&#8217;s super simple to get started inspecting your apps with the Xamarin Inspector&#8217;s deep integration into both Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio. All you need to do is ensure that you&#8217;ve updated to the latest version of Xamarin and then install it for either <a href=\"https:\/\/download.xamarin.com\/inspector\/XamarinInspector.pkg\">Mac<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/download.xamarin.com\/inspector\/XamarinInspector.msi\">Windows<\/a>. That&#8217;s it! Simply open up any application (iOS, Android, Mac, or WPF) in your choice of IDE and run your app in Debug Mode in an emulator. You&#8217;ll now see an inspect icon next to your debug icons to start the inspector:\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/mac-heres-the-button.png\" alt=\"Inspector Mac Icon\" width=\"630\" height=\"86\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-23123\" \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/Screen-Shot-2015-12-01-at-11.13.55-AM.png\" alt=\"Inspect from VS\" width=\"600\" height=\"77\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-23134\" \/><\/p>\n<h2>REPL Some Code<\/h2>\n<p>With the inspector up and running, you have access to a full C# REPL (Read-Eval-Print Loop). You can write any C# code, declare variables, and even bring in namespace using statements from your application. You&#8217;re literally inside your application!<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/ReplLive2.gif\" alt=\"ReplLive2\" width=\"646\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-23148\" \/><\/p>\n<h2>Inspecting &amp; Visualizing<\/h2>\n<p>Writing and executing code live inside of your app is fun, but the Inspector&#8217;s sweet spot is tweaking your user interface while your app is running. With the Inspector running, simply tap on the &#8220;Inspect&#8221; icon on the top right and then hover over your application to select an element to inspect. With a UI element selected, you&#8217;re now able to type in the keyword &#8220;<strong>selectedView<\/strong>&#8221; to inspect its properties and modify them live. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/Inspecting-Live1.gif\" alt=\"Inspecting Live\" width=\"646\" height=\"320\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-23127\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Additionally, if you&#8217;re on the Mac you can toggle your view over the expanded view to get a detailed peek into your application and see all of it&#8217;s properties. <\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/44\/2019\/03\/Exploded-View-1024x480.png\" alt=\"Exploded View Inspector\" width=\"646\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-23125\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Inspector enables you to walk through your entire application modifying the UI and running code and then take those changes back into your IDE to finalize your app.<\/p>\n<h2>Learn More<\/h2>\n<p>To learn more about the Xamarin Inspector, be sure to browse through our <a href=\"https:\/\/developer.xamarin.com\/guides\/cross-platform\/inspector\/\">full documentation<\/a>. The Inspector is still in early preview and we&#8217;d love for you to give it a try and tell us what you think by getting involved on the <a href=\"https:\/\/forums.xamarin.com\/categories\/inspector\">Xamarin Inspector forum<\/a>. As always, if you happen to run into any issues, please feel free to <a href=\"https:\/\/bugzilla.xamarin.com\/enter_bug.cgi?product=Inspector\">report them<\/a>.\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you&#8217;re adding the final polish before releasing your mobile app, it&#8217;s easy to get stuck in that dreaded tweak-code-debug-run cycle. For every change that you make, even the simplest ones, you have to relaunch your app on several emulators or devices to ensure it&#8217;s working properly. This is where the brand new Xamarin Inspector [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":544,"featured_media":23127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4],"class_list":["post-23122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-developers","tag-xamarin-platform"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>When you&#8217;re adding the final polish before releasing your mobile app, it&#8217;s easy to get stuck in that dreaded tweak-code-debug-run cycle. For every change that you make, even the simplest ones, you have to relaunch your app on several emulators or devices to ensure it&#8217;s working properly. This is where the brand new Xamarin Inspector [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/544"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23122"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23122\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/xamarin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}