Debugging Flash Movies with Fiddler 2

What is Fiddler?

From the Fiddler website:

Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet.

Simple really. Introduced to me by Chris Preece, this is a Microsoft-made free debugging tool which shows you all of the header information and file requests that your browser makes. It’s works with IE, and also claims to work with other browsers (I’ve never tried this though)

What does it do?

It has many more technical capabilities than those I need, but I found this quite useful for debugging flash movies on live websites. I’ve never really figured out the whole ‘remote-debugging’ features of Flash, so Fiddler offers another way of debugging them – showing you all the url requests that the flash movie makes. You can easily identify where things are going wrong once you find your crazy malformed urls in the requests list.

Fiddler Links:

Visit the Fiddler website.

Download Fiddler 2.

Read Developer.com’s getting started with Fiddler tutorial.

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About James

James is a Senior New Media Developer at MMT Digital, and has BA(Hons) in Design for Interactive Media from the University of Gloucestershire. He loves designing and producing all sorts of website and Flash-related things, as well as prattling on about technologies.Day-to-day he works with Flash, Dreamweaver, Director, Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 (MOSS) and in his spare time he mucks about in Flex and Wordpress.Follow James on Twitter.

4 Responses to “Debugging Flash Movies with Fiddler 2”

  1. Fiddling Flasher 3rd June, 2008 at 3:22 pm # Reply

    At which point do you discuss debugging Flash with Fiddler?

  2. James 4th June, 2008 at 9:00 am # Reply

    Ok, perhaps the title is a bit misleading – what I meant was that in general, Fiddler can be used to help you debug the http side of things – which is useful when you can’t get trace statements from Flash because you’re testing things in a browser.

  3. amnon 16th January, 2010 at 1:54 am # Reply

    this is so not a “Microsoft-made debugging tool”.

  4. James 16th January, 2010 at 10:53 am # Reply

    @amnon – True, sorry. I must’ve been misinformed back then. I’ll amend the post accordingly.

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