Become a Web Debugging Virtuoso with Fiddler
Speaker: Eric Lawrence Program Manager for Internet Explorer.
Fiddler operates as a local proxy application that intercepts all HTTP and HTTPS traffic. Fiddler is extensible in 3 ways:
- Inspectors. Displays http traffic in a convenient way to display the content.
- IFiddlerExtension. An extension that gets loaded directly into the runtime, you break it your bought it,
- Script Engine. Used for filtering results.
Fiddler on startup configures WinInet settings to use it as the proxy. All browsers will work with Fiddler by default except FireFox. FireFox doesnt read WinInet settings so a FireFox extension is needed.
Fiddler will also work across machines if you set it to accept external proxy connections. So a pc running fiddler can debug from a mac as long as the mac is using the PC as a proxy.
Fiddler can also do reverse proxy monitoring. If you set fiddler running on port 80 and have it forwarding to your web application on port 81. All traffic to your website can be monitored through fiddler. Not recommended for running this in production.
Fiddler output options
- Copy sessions to clipboard
- Store as a plain text field.
- Extract binary response bodies
- Archive to databases.
- Export a Visual Studio .WebTest file.
- Write your own output extension.
- SAZ File:Session archive zip. Contains request and response bytes, timing and other meta data, html index file.
