Fiddler has saved me a tonne of times with it's man in the middle certificate for TLS traffic. Coupled with wireshark it's a fantastic tool.
I assume you're meaning REST vs. SOAP (old ASMX). Plain on HTTP calls are a lot easier and you can implement a lot of already existing basic technologies to work with it. I.e. You can make REST call's in JavaScript, just try doing SOAP calls and you will start wishing it was implemented in REST. I've also dealt with JAVA to a .Net SOAP service and there's a number of things that need to be tweaked to get it to work because of MS out of the box design decisions. The main difference is REST is lightweight, human readable and you don't require any specific tools to use it; SOAP is easy to consume thanks to WSDL, strongly coupled as it is forced to use a contract and has a tonne of tools supporting it. REST is what SOAP should have been, but something along the way just went wrong. Take a look at http://geeknizer.com/rest-vs-soap-using-http-choosing-the-right-webservice-p rotocol/ for more a good comparison. ---- Michael Lyons From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Greg Keogh Sent: Sunday, 19 June 2011 8:09 AM To: 'ozDotNet' Subject: RE: REST call (obvious solution) I was also worried that the problem was related to certificates or obscure properties that would take days to solve, but Fiddler was a vital help. I had a 3rd party app which made the REST calls successfully, but my app was failing. I made a couple of calls in the working app and then in mine and I compared the traffic in Fiddler. I had to squint a bit, but eventually I noticed that my HttpWebRequest.Host property was different, and adjusting it to match the working app's value fixed my problem. So it was a subtle error which produce a frighteningly misleading symptom. Fiddler couldn't unscramble to the HTTPS traffic at first, but there is an option you can switch on and then it makes and installs a fake certificate, then you can see what's happening. It's a great tool. This is the first time I've directly make REST calls, and I must say I admire the brain-dead simplicity of them. However, I'm not sure why I would use REST over old ASMX if I wanted the world to consume my API. Greg
