Some links to old posts so they stay alive until I can transfer them over:

 

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Previously (like 5 minutes ago) I blogged about HTTPLook. That review was written a few months ago & copied over to my new blog (here).

So, recently I came across Fiddler, a free utility made by Microsoft (or an MS employee with some free time). It actually acts as an HTTP proxy that your browsers run through, and it displays all the HTTP calls in its main window as seen below:

Click for full image

One of the things I like about it is it's quite stable. We had problems with HTTPLook "corrupting" our network settings, requiring a reboot to fix. Fiddler runs cleanly, can save the traces to logs for later inspection, and has a host of other features that many people would never use. We usually use it for debugging missing HTML components (i.e. a javascript or image file might be missing from an HTML page, yet the error isn't visible by inspection), or debugging web service calls (i.e. from .NET winforms applications or Flash apps). But Fiddler also has an interesting guide to performance tuning using HTTP sniffers. Might be worth checking out.

So, if you need an HTTP sniffer on Windows and are cheap, check out Fiddler. You just might like it.

Application: HTTPLook
Vendor: BinaryAge Software
Home Page: www.httpsniffer.com
Price: $29.95
Rating: 9/10
Pros: Cheap, lots of features, easy to use, works with any browser or application that makes HTTP calls
Cons: Plain-looking, not free, missing a few higher-end features

If you're working on an application that makes a bunch of HTTP calls (a spider, a data-driven Flash application, a web browser, a browser plugin, etc.), there aren't a lot of easy ways to monitor the calls. Yes, you can step through the code in debug mode, but that's problematic when debugging production installs. Not to mention slow and overkill. You can also look at the web logs, but sometimes you don't have access to those, or you have to wade through thousands of lines. You could write a call-logging mechanism, but that takes time & might have bugs of its own. What you need is an easy way to log & view all the HTTP calls that a machine is making. Enter BinaryAge Software's HTTPLook.

We have a data-driven flash application on a number of our sites. It calls web services, retrieves XML, downloads images, and hits "pixels" for traffic reporting purposes. But sometimes it would hang, or fail to load an image, or fail to poke a pixel, & it would be a PITA to see what it was doing & which calls were broken. With HTTPLook, you simple load up the application, click "Start", and start surfing/using your app. HTTPLook records the HTTP calls as you make them. It lists the outbound requests & the returns. Status code, cookie settings, headers, bodies, all there. Plus you can filter results, save logs, etc. Here's a screenshot:


Click for bigger view

More screenshots are here.

Now when we have problems, we can quickly pinpoint the troubled URL. We can easily inspect the XML being returned from the web services to see if there's errant data. We can see if there are any missing images by looking for "404" return statuses. Our debugging time & troubleshooting time was cut down to less than 10% of what it was. But the best part is that it's under $30, compared to several hundred dollars for competing products I found. And there's a free trial, too.

I don't mean to pimp this app too hard. I don't get any kind of referral fee, nor do I have anything to do with the company. I was just happy to find an inexpensive app that filled a niche & saved us a ton of time, and I thought others might appreciate the tip, too.

Now, I should mention that if you have to have a free solution, you could use Ethereal, a free network analyzer. But installing it, setting it up, configuring the filters, etc. isn't nearly as easy as HTTPLook. If you have the time, enjoy jumping through hoops, and don't have thirty bucks to burn, try out Ethereal. But be sure to also install the trial version of HTTPLook, too -- after a little while you might decide $30 isn't too much to pay for a no-frills app that does exactly what it's meant to do.

While doing some research for a coding standards document, I found a big wiki discussion on the pros & cons of Hungarian Notation. I started out programming with Pascal, then C (LPC actually), then C++, then VBA, then javascript, then VB, then C# & VB.NET. Maybe there were some other languages in there, too.

So, I instinctively use Hungarian Notation, yet I'm reading that it's a bad idea. That it only handles basic types, not objects (most of my variables are objects anyhow), that it obfuscates code, that it's "yucky", etc. Seems like Microsoft has gotten away from it in their coding guidelines, too.

Seems like the traditionalists are largely in the pro-HN camp, which makes me think that in 10 years you won't see very much HN at all. Although who knows what code will be like then.

Lastly, I got a kick out of the CodeSmell article. It refers to an experienced coder's ability to look at code & somehow sense that something "could" be wrong with it, without exactly knowing what. Hence the "smell" aspect ... it smells like it could be bad, but you're not as certain as if you could see it, touch it, etc.

Testing out the new blog. http://www.dasblog.net is where you can get the code.