John Bristowe

One of the great things about being a web developer today is the large amount of tools available to help troubleshoot and optimize applications. Over the past number of years, my team and I have shared information about these tools through the Canadian Developer Connection blog and events like the realDEVELOPMENT_07 tour. Some examples include Firebug, YSlow, YUI Compressor, the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar and others. In fact, I wrote about a great episode of Hanselminutes where Jeff Atwood provided the audience with a list of some tools that he uses.

Of all the tools available for web developers, there’s one that I particularly like and that tool is Fiddler:

A Screenshot of Fiddler

Fiddler is a freeware utility written by Eric Lawrence that logs all of the HTTP(S) traffic occurring on your machine. Recently, Eric delivered a presentation at Microsoft PDC 2009 entitled, "Become a Web Debugging Virtuoso with Fiddler", which you download from here. For the uninitiated, this session provides a great primer to Fiddler. Highly recommended.

I like Fiddler a lot because it gives me an ability to watch all HTTP(S) traffic that occurs on my machine and inspect the underlying aspects of this traffic on a request-by-request basis. This is important when building a web application where you want to have a clear understanding of what it's doing underneath the user interface.

Fiddler's Architecture

Another aspect of Fiddler that I like is the ability to get a better sense of the HTTP(S) traffic itself. For example, with Fiddler I can examine the HTTP headers (including cookies). This is useful when you want to see how your web server utilizes caching via content expiration or compression via GZIP encoding. These aspects turn out to be quite important, especially when trying to reduce the frequency and size of your client requests.

Extensibility in the form of add-ons is the probably the best feature of Fiddler. With this capability, developers are free to extend the functionality of Fiddler to provide more meaningful information around the HTTP(S) traffic that occurs on a machine. There are many add-ons available for Fiddler. For a full listing, check out the extensions page here.

In conclusion, many tools exist for web developers. However, if there's one tool that's an absolute must, it's Fiddler. Download it today!

This article also appears on the Canadian Developer Connection blog here.

Yesterday, after a long day of preparing resources for Microsoft TechDays Canada, I grabbed my iPod and I took my dog, Hugo for a walk. During times like these, I like to unwind by listening to some of my favourite podcasts. As I've stated many times in the past, podcasts provide a great way to keep your mind and body busy at the same time; they allow you to multitask during your brain's "off-peak hours", such as performing chores around the house or, in my case, walking the dog.

Last night I listened to show #175 of Hanselminutes entitled, Optimizing Your Website with Jeff Atwood and Stack Overflow. In this interview, Scott Hanselman spoke to Jeff Atwood about website optimization and what his team at Stack Overflow has done to provide the best experience possible for its end users. By the end of the recording, I concluded that this interview was the best podcast recording of the summer (for technical content). It's a great introduction to the topic of website optimization and should be considered required listening by all Web developers, irrespective of experience or technology stack preference. Below, I've summarized some of the resources that were cited during this interview for your reference:

• Firebug
• Performance analysis tools: YSlow, Google Page Speed
• Minification tools: YUI Compressor, Packer for .NET, MvcScriptManager
• jQuery
• Content distribution network (CDN)
• Gravatar (globally recognized avatar)
• App_Offline for ASP.NET
• reCAPTCHA
• DotNetOpenAuth

Some additional resources around the topic of website optimization include the following: 

• Developer Toolbar in Internet Explorer 8
• .NET Rocks! show #390 - YSlow! Steve Souders finds Website Bottlenecks
• Exceptional Performance
• "Even Faster Websites" by Steve Sounders at Google I/O 2009

Hopefully, some of these resources will help you address your needs for website optimization. Going forward, I encourage you to listen to Hanselminutes, visit Stack Overflow, and register for Microsoft TechDays Canada - we'll have a session dedicated to helping you with website optimization entitled, "Practical Web Testing". I hope to see you there!

This article also appears on the Canadian Developer Connection blog here.