Network Programmers Toolchest

In this post, I want to talk about some of the tools that a programmer doing network programmer might want to learn, in order to do his job better.

First, let us talk about logging tools. No matter which library you use, whether it is System.Net from .NET framework, or CommonsHTTP from the Apache Commons project, you need to have a way of enabling logging to see what is going on in the library.

If you are using System.Net, then you can enable logging using the Logging facility provided in the .NET framework.

http://ferozedaud.blogspot.com/2009/08/tracing-with-systemnet.html

For Apache ComonsHttp library, you can enable logging using the Log4J logging library:

http://logging.apache.org/log4j/index.html

Next, you need a way to capture network traffic in order to see what is going on in the network. Many tools exist that can allow you to do that. I prefer to use Wireshark, but on windows, Netmon is also pretty good.

http://www.wireshark.org
http://blogs.technet.com/netmon

Imagine that you are trying to write code that can simulate loggin in to a website. For eg, Facebook or a line of business application. However, it isnt working - you tried using logging but cant seem to get to the problem. In this case, you might want to use a browser and try out the same scenario, and see what the browser is doing differently.

You can do that by using Wireshark/Netmon to sniff the browser session, but it is not very user friendly. Plus, if the session is encrypted (HTTPS) you cannot even make sense of the network sniff.

In this case, it helps to have a browser extension that can sniff the outgoing requests and incoming responses for you. I like to use Firebug on Firefox, and there are equivalent extensions for Internet Explorer as well.

http://getfirebug.com/

Here are the ones for Internet Explorer.

http://www.fiddler2.com/Fiddler2/version.asp
http://www.httpwatch.com/


Readers: Do you have any favorite tools that I have not covered here? I would like to know about them. Add a comment to this post with the information.