Mediachase ASP.NET eCommerce Framework - Paddy O's Corner - Tips, Tricks, and Tools : Tools

Wireshark Packet Sniffer

tim5 — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 18:09:00 GMT

WireShark is a free network protocol analyzer for Unix and Windows. It allows you to examine data from a live network or from a capture file on disk. You can interactively browse the capture data, viewing summary and detail information for each packet. Ethereal has several powerful features, including a rich display filter language and the ability to view the reconstructed stream of a TCP session.

In terms of the ECF, on a practical level Wireshark has been used in the configuration of payement gateways to detect issues such as certificate errors.

You can learn about Wireshark in their FAQ

Wireshark's site

"Fiddle" your HTTP traffic

tim5 — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 21:02:00 GMT

Another notable tool for developers is "Fiddler".

What is Fiddler?

Fiddler is a HTTP Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP Traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler is designed to be much simpler than using NetMon or Achilles, and includes a simple but powerful JScript.NET event-based scripting subsystem.

What can it be used for?

In terms of the ECF, if you need to see data that is sent out or coming in, you can use Fiddler to view this traffic. One particular instance would be when you are working with shipping or payment gateways, don't have fullsource, and wish to investigate traffic coming and going in order to troubleshoot.

More information

Introduction to Fiddler on MSDN

Download

Fiddler Tool

Cool editing tool: NotePad2

tim5 — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 20:33:00 GMT

One of our developers here at Medichase stumbled upon a little editing tool called: "Notepad2". It's very handy for making quick edits to your code or config files.

It has been our experience that, for whatever reasons, some editors like Wordpad can introduce errors into XML files. Some may find a tool like Notepad2 handy and others may not -- nevertheless, alternatives such as Notepad2 are always nice to find. Especially when they are free!

While making those quick edits to your files you can choose one of the various "syntax schemes" from CSS, C#, C++, XML, VB, SQL, and so on. These schemes make edits a bit easier by color coding your code appropriately.

From Notepad2's self description:

What's this?

The original Notepad shipped with Windows is probably the handiest program of all times, small, fast, without frills! Notepad2 tries to follow this principle, it's a small, fast and free text editor with syntax highlighting for HTML and other common languages.

You can download and check out screenshots here: Notepad2