Fiddler Inspector for Federation Messages

Fiddler Inspector for Federation Messages

Fiddler is a great tool to help debug specific issues associated with how the messages look on the wire. Fiddler is especially relevant in troubleshooting interop issues or to see if a request was received and a response sent during the federation dance. Typically you will require to configure Fiddler with HTTPS support as most of the federation dance is under HTTPS. Install information for Fiddler can be found at http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/version.asp

While Fiddler is very useful, if you need to inspect the federation messages in more detail, for e.g. identify the attributes and their values or the subjectIdentifier, this is harder as you see raw XML. Fiddler also features various extensibility points to make it even more useful to parse and format network messages using its 'Inspector' model. Below, you will find an 'inspector' to help parse and view these messages.

Using the inspector Federation tab you can see the response already decoded and in the format of XML opened in a browser. This supports  WS-Federation and SAML 2.0p

To install the federation inspector, please do the following:

1.       Close Fiddler
2.       Download (http://identitymodel.codeplex.com/releases/view/52187) and just copy the files to the inspectors folder.
3.       Restart Fiddler.

For any issues/feedback, please report them in the download link provided for the federation inspector.