Yes, Fiddler is wonderful

September 13, 2005 Comment on this post [3] Posted in ASP.NET | Bugs | Tools

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Fiddlerworkslikethis For some reason this week literally 5 people emailed me to tell me how great Fiddler is and that they wonder why it's not on the Ultimate Tool List. Well, to be clear, both Fiddler and Eric Lawrence are the bomb. Fidder is basically an "HTTP Debugger" (implemented as a local proxy) has a nice eventing system to support scripting. Why haven't I used it? I just haven't really needed it. Nearly all my debugging of HTTP/ASP.NET has been done happily with the simple elegance of ieHttpHeaders with the occasional use of TamperIE. Certainly my tools are simple while Fiddler is very rich in functionality so it's not really fair to compare them. I see from the Fiddler page that you can really mess with HTTP Headers and what-not with Fiddler. That said, I'm going to download the new release from last week and give it some mindshare as this tool has definitely struck a chord with many folks.

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Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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September 13, 2005 12:44

I use Fiddler, not only for IE/APS.NET, but also to debug the communication between our webservices and our WinForms client application. Can't do that with IE-plugins.

Tommy Carlier

September 13, 2005 14:46

Yep, ieHttpHeaders does the trick for most things and is simple to use. I'm interested to hear your comments on Fiddler. Thanks.

Erik Lane

September 13, 2005 18:48

I love Fiddler, too! Add me to the list. It helped me debug a really frustrating redirect issue I was having with a third party "web service." I'll call it a web service because it was being used to retrieve data for a client of mine, but it was really just a GET to a page that returned some data that we had to parse. It was so great to be able to tweak the headers until I found the exact, and obscure, issue.

The only complaint I can think of about Fiddler is that I couldn't get it to work with Firefox... It just didn't record any header info from that browser. Might be a simple setting - I didn't spend much time trying, I just used IE.

Brian

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