Friday 7 March 2008

HTTP monitoring on windows

As a web developer watching data being sent over your network connection is often important and sometimes essential for reliably debugging your work (when you're not sure if you clagged togheter code is making spurious requests in the background or not).

Today I'm still building the top secret Flash project which is going well and is now into thousands of lines of code and it's starting to get complicated. Flash 8 on my Dell M70 takes around 30 seconds to build the swf.

Any way, so I needed to watch the HTTP trafic coming out of my SWF to make sure it was doing what it was supposed to do. I considdered running it through a web page and using firebug's net monitor or getting Charles installed but it occured to me that the most reliable source (on windows at least) would be a microsoft tool that I'd seen Matt pratting about with a while ago, Microsoft Network Monitor 3.1.

Once you have downloaded and installed that, simply click "Create a new capture tab" and then in capture filter tab paste the following:

contains (Property.HttpHost, "the.domain.name")

where "the.domain.name" is the host name of the server you wish to watch traffic for then press the start button and you will see all your HTTP (web) traffic from any application to that domain

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