Silverlight, SOAP, and GZip - troubleshooting

Question

How do I turn off gzip compression on my SOAP requests from Silverlight 3 or 4? I'm getting a 500 error from my server page (asmx) and for some reason the debugger doesn't catch it. Because the 500 error response is encoded I can't tell what the problem is from Fiddler.

Or if I could turn it off from the asmx side that would be fine too.

Answer 1

When you say that your 500 error response is encoded, do you mean compressed (gzipped)? If so, Fiddler can decompress that for you. When you click on the session that you want to inspect, do the following:

1. In the lower right pane (the Response pane), click on the 'Transformer' tab.
2. In the HTTP Compression section, you'll probably see that either GZIP Encoding (or one of the others) has its radio button clicked. Click 'No Compression'. This will uncompress your response data.
3. Go to the TextView tab and you should be able to see your response.

You can also do this more quickly by clicking on the header of the response pane section (usually it will state that the response is encoded and that you can click on the message to automatically decompress it).

This way, you can let Fiddler decompress your response so you don't have to fiddle around with your server settings in order to turn off compression.

I hope this helps!