Snowball - The Blog - Debugging with Fiddler on Windows 7

Dear visitor, thanks for stopping by! If you want, you can follow all updates on Snowball.be via RSS. You can also follow me on Twitter or Facebook. More interesting posts from other Microsoft Regional Directors can be found at The Region.

Debugging with Fiddler on Windows 7

Gill Cleeren

.net | ADO.net

July 16, 2009

Fiddler is a great http debugging tool, allowing you to see all traffic going in and out. It’s very useful when for example working with ADO.NET Data Services to see which request is being sent to the service.

It so happened that since I had been using Windows 7, I hadn’t used or installed it yet. I was just creating a Silverlight application that works with ADO.NET Data Services and there was a specific query I wanted to see. So I installed Fiddler 2 on this Windows 7 machine.

Normally, when using Fiddler for local debugging, you add a “.” after the localhost: http://localhost.:1234/whatever.aspx. This should show the requests in Fiddler. However, it didn’t seem to work on my machine.

Luckily, I knew there was another way to see the local requests: using the ipv4 notation: http://ipv4.fiddler:1234/whatever.aspx. This seems to work.

I’m not sure if this has something to do with Windows 7 though. In any case, this second approach seems to work, so it might come in handy if the first one doesn’t work on your PC either :).

Fiddler can be downloaded on www.fiddler2.com (thanks Dominiek)

Posted on: Thursday, July 16, 2009 10:58:37 PM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00) | Comments [3]

Friday, July 17, 2009 11:46:42 AM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

Fiddler can be downloaded here: http://www.fiddler2.com

Dominiek

Saturday, July 18, 2009 1:56:17 PM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

As long as you have admin rights to your machine (or ability to do so) you can also add an entry to your hosts file to use a different domain. I've been using this approach for playing with the Azure local services. Something like:

ECHO 127.0.0.1 dev.localazure.com >> c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Then just change your config settings or url to use the dev.localazure.com url.

Jason Haley

Monday, August 17, 2009 10:46:07 PM (Romance Daylight Time, UTC+02:00)

I'm working with Silverlight 3, ADO.NET Data Services and "Firebug" (a Fiddler like request sniffing tool).

But since Silverlight 3, ADO.NET Data Services responses are in "binary xml" instead of clear text. This of course does not allow me to easily read the data (Firebug display "Response contain binary data" instead of the actual data).

Did you get the same kind of problem with Fiddler ? Do you know the specific configuration to use to force "clear text" exchanges between Silverlight client and you "ADO.NET Data Services" Service ?

E. Martin

Comments are closed.

2/8/2012 10:33:12 PM

Welcome to Snowball.be

Hello and welcome to snowball.be!

My name is Gill Cleeren, I'm a Microsoft Regional Director and an MVP ASP.NET.
On Snowball.be, you'll find all kind news and articles on .net, ASP.NET, WPF, Silverlight and Microsoft in general.
More on me can be found on my about page.

Should you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact me by