How do I evaluate dependency properties in silverlight/WPF from S.O.S. ?

Question

Hello all. This question is fairly straightforward -- I am trying to debug a memory leak in a silverlight application using s.o.s. I was able to get some good info using !gcroot to determine what objects have open references to the one that should be getting cleared; but in these cases they tend to be core UI elements (like grid and storyboard), and I can't really differentiate them without the ability to see the values of their dependency properties (like name). Trying to look through the dependency properties with !dumpobj is a total wild goose chase for me, they are all static classes (the properties that is) that reference each other and I just end up going in circles. At no point was I ever able to find a single actual value for a dependency property anywhere.

I googled about this quite a bit, but was only able to find other people asking the question, or speculation not leading to an answer. http://blogs.msdn.com/tess/archive/2008/09/16/q-a-reader-emails-about-net-memory-leaks-and-random-questions.aspx is one such page without answer.

Thanks in advance for any help!

Answer 1

Looking at the source of DependencyObject.GetValue in Reflector makes me think that this is non-trivial to do in Windbg. As an alternative (and a hacky one, I admit), in your own classes you could bind a standard CLR property to the Name DP, so that you do have a value that you can read in the debugger.

Answer 2

That is a reasonable alternative I hadn't thought of. While it would be nice to have a procedure to evaluate the dependancy properties themselves -- I can diagnose this particular issue by adding class members mirroring the dependancy propert value, and then just get rid of them once I have it figured out.

Thanks for the reply!