WCF Service Diagnostics Part 2

In the previous post on this topic I gave an outline of the most common tools used to look into problems with WCF.  In this post I'll give some more information on more advanced tools and approaches for more insidious problems.

SOAP Xml verfication.
It is quite common to use WCF services as the boundaries between different parties or boundaries between responsibilities of teams.  Just like defining an interface so two developers can work on either side in parallel, one developing the interface implementation and the other the consumer; so can service WSDL be used.  In this scenario parties often swap SOAP xml requests and responses as files and check them against their own code.

Tools that can be used are:

• SOAP UI. Basically this tool allows you to copy and paste SOAP Xml into its UI and then send it to a service.  It will also allow you to see the response SOAP.  Obviously however it is specific to the SOAP protocol and HTTP. It does appear to have loads of other functionality that could be useful particularly for JAVA based diagnostics.
  
• Fiddler can be used as well.  I have used it to look and record the HTTP traffic before, but apparentely you can also use it as a proxy to return preconfigured responses as well (although I personally haven't tried this).
• WsdlSoapXmlValidator. This is a rough tool I have written to take request and response SOAP xml and verify them against the embedded XSD schemas within WSDL (it assumes the WSDL includes Schema and will not work otherwise) and then host a dummy service compliant with the WSDL and using the request and response xml against the service to test actual WCF deserialisation of the samples.
  
• WireShark is another tool I have reached for on odd occasions to view network traffic. This is useful for TCP/IP and binary based protocols.
• WCF Load Test Tool. This is a free codeplex tool written by the Visual Studio ALM Rangers.