The HTTP(S) traffic sniffing tool Fiddler is a must have for any developer and doubly so for screen scrapers.

Here’s one feature that I hadn’t noticed until last week: the Composer tool

To access the composer tool, click on the Composer tab on the right side of Fiddler’s main screen.

After you click on the Composer tab, you should see this on your screen. You can either manually enter a HTTP verb, URL, and HTTP headers or drag/drop a another request you’ve previously recorded.

Notice some of the options you have in terms of HTTP verb:

Yeah, way more than just GET and POST. WebDAV developers rejoice. :)

Similarly, you can specify the version of the HTTP protocol:

Let’s make a sample redirect request to one of my FranksWorld.com/go links:

Enter http://www.franksworld.com/Go/Phone into the textbox and click Execute as shown below:

The left side of your Fiddler windows should look something like this now:

Two HTTP 302 redirects and a final HTTP 200.

This makes sense: the Frank’s World GO link is a wrapper around another Microsoft link redirector to information about getting started with Windows Phone development. (We do this to track who gets the most amount of clicks, etc).

If you’re trying to send data to a server via POST, this tools is essential, as you can test different HTTP “conversations” without writing a line of code.