Monitoring traffic to Cassini on localhost

Question

I'm experiencing some really odd timeout issues when running a ASP.NET 2.0 project on Cassini on localhost, and I don't have enough data to get a clue of what's going on.

Is there a way to monitor localhost traffic to Cassini, either using some specific development tool or a general-purpose monitoring app such as fiddler?

Just to pre-empt some answers I'm already aware of:

• Normally I can use the well-known dot-hack for using fiddler to monitor localhost traffic, but with Cassini I get the following error message in the browser:

  [Fiddler] Connection to localhost. failed. Exception Text: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it ::1:3213

• Fiddler also listens to localhost on http://ipv4.fiddler:port, and I can intercept the traffic. But when I do this the timeout issues don't occur!

Any other tools or fiddler workarounds welcome! Thanks!

Edit: Oops. This question had already been asked... Twice.. Didn't come up on search or suggestions. The solution found in the second thread is to use the dot-hack with ip-address (http://127.0.0.1.:port/ instead of "localhost". This question may be closed.

Answer 1

While fiddler ignores requests to localhost, it listens to 127.0.0.1. (note the trailing dot):

So this won't work:

http://localhost:1234/

But this will:

http://127.0.0.1.:1234/

Answer 2

You're generally better off using http://ipv4.fiddler as it makes it more explicit what you're trying to do.

Answer 3

CassiniDev is an open source project that was developed to fill in all the blanks left by WebDev.WebServer/Cassini.

You will find this issue handled as well as many others.

It works well as a stand-alone server, as an in-process server suitable for testing and embedding and, most notably, as a direct replacement for the Visual Studio 2008/2010 dev servers.