Walking the visual tree in F#

This blog post shows how to dump the visual tree into a console window, using F#.

In my continued quest to understand how F# and WPF can work well together, I wrote a simple utility which walks down the visual tree of a UI and writes it out to a console window.  I found that F# is a natural fit for this type of quick script-like coding.  This app is not imminently useful, but it is a great way to both learn F# and get used to manipulating WPF with F#.

Here is the F# code:

Notice in the ‘createWindow’ function it uses the ‘use’ keyword.  That is a relatively new addition to the language, which you can read more about here.  It’s like a ‘using’ block in C#.

When the app runs, it loads a Window from a XAML file.  That XAML looks like this:

When you run the app, you will see both a console window and the window which was loaded from the XAML file.  Here is a screenshot:

Download the demo app here: Walk visual tree in F# (demo app)  Be sure to change the file extension from .DOC to .ZIP and then decompress the file.  Download the F# compiler and tools here.