When I encountered Web service problems earlier this month, one of the first diagnostic tools I reached for was SoapScope. Naturally, it wasn't on the computer where I was developing the client, but that wouldn't have mattered so much; the big problem was that my license had expired. Yes, Murphy struck again, twice.
Writing for InfoWorld brings precious few perks, but one of them is that software vendors are often willing to give me review copies of their products. Mindreef graciously supplied an updated SoapScope license, so I uninstalled the old, expired copy, downloaded the current build, and installed it where it would do me the most good.
There was another catch (yes, Murphy again: that makes three times): SoapScope's collector function needed WinPCap 3.1, but WireShark had installed WinPCap 4.0.1, which has a different interface but works on Windows Vista. I decided that SoapScope would do me more good than Wireshark right then, so I uninstalled WinPCap 4.0.1 and installed WinPCap 3.1. For once, Murphy was wrong: both programs were happy with WinPCap 3.1.
Of course, the next morning when I had all my tools fired up and wanted to do some serious debugging, the Web service was down. Make that Murphy 4, Heller 1. But once the guys on the West Coast got to work, they restarted the service for me.
SoapScope let me manually try out different parameters to the Web service call I was debugging from its own interface, and view the results cleanly. It also captured the Web service traffic my program was generating and nailed down the problem: everything was absolutely fine until the ATL Web service stack tried to parse the response. That knowledge triggered my email to a friend at Microsoft; you know the rest.
You can develop and debug Web services without having SoapScope, but why would you want to?
Posted by Martin Heller on July 27, 2007 07:14 AM
