Apparently today is "Windows Developer Tools Day" and because I contributed to the book of the same name, I've been asked to write an entry on my favourite free tool, how it has helped me.
I use a lot of free tools, it takes me ages to install them and as I don't really keep a list it's largely an organic process. However, the tool which really sticks out in my mind is Fiddler. Basically it's a proxy which sits on your machine and logs all HTTP traffic.
So why is this useful, well sometimes you really need to know exactly what is being sent from the server to the client, especially these AJAXY days when requests to the server can happen at any time. Not to mention the rise and rise of web services. All these requests get logged by Fiddler.
The time that really sticks out as a life saver was the development of a web service client windows application which in development and release worked 100% with site 1 however with site 2 the application crashed on every call to the web service. As the development environment was a long way away debugging was discounted so I launched Fiddler and had a listen. It logged the call out, and the return from the server. The BODY of the response was fine, however, when I looked at the HTTP Header there was something very wrong. It turned out there was an ISAPI Filter at site 2 which announced itself by including an invalid HTTP Header.
The filter wasn't necessary so we removed the filter and this removed the problem. Actually I believe that the error was being thrown from a third party component and so it would have been impossible to handle the error other than by fixing the HTTP Header.
So there we go enjoy the rest of "Windows Developer Power Tools" day.