You may have been thinking I had forgotten about this series of articles since I haven’t posted to it in a while. Nope! Just haven’t run across anything that was truely aazing enough to be an “Essential Tool”. Well, I recently found just that web I had to troubleshoot a application that was making calls to a web service.
The tool i was lead to is Fiddler, the Web Debugger!!! If you’re like me and you have to trouble shoot web applications that make web service calls– you’re going to LOVE fiddler. No more digging through logs to determine problems real time, especially since IIS caches the log data and writes it in chunks.
Fiddler displays the HTTP (and HTTPS) traffic originated from a machine it is ran on and then shows the cooresponding response from the server you connected with in the request. It’s a real life saver, especially if your not certain the packet is well formed for a SOAP web service on the other end. As an added bonus, Fiddler also allows you to see the raw HTTP (or HTTPS) headers and response headers.
Best of all it’s FREE!!! (We’ll it cost me a $250 call to Microsoft to find out about it… but the application is free and for you the information is free!) Try it out— TODAY!
