Pistachio - WPF Resource VisualizerI’m excited to be posting an early build of Pistachio for the WPF Community to get their hands on and try out. Pistachio is a utility I created with fellow Infragistics VDGer Tim Hussey. It’s pretty simple really, you just open a .csproj file with Pistachio and it identifies all resources defined within the project, then shows you which of those resources are used and where they’re used. It’s now a part of our project cycle – we use it to identify all stray resources and clean up our projects. It’s also great for getting a big picture understanding of your current resource structure.

We have plenty of ideas for making the overall experience better, but I’d love to get some feedback anyway. I’m currently using a xamCarouselListBox at the top of the window to display resource dictionaries. In mockups this approaches looks clean and nice, but in practice it doesn’t really cut it. Most of our resource paths are actually longer than the template for each item provides, so we start to see text colliding. I’m planning on moving the resource list to the left side of the page and possibly presenting it in a tree or vertical tab format. I want to reinforce the relationship between the active resource page and the grid of resources. Later posts will also incorporate usage visualizations courtesy of our new xamChart.

 So — download Pistachio and take it for a spin! Let me know if you love it or hate it (or if it doesn’t work for you).