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Comment by regularfry | Hacker News Reader

Urgh. I had exactly this experience trying to get the Exchange Web Services API to work. That's worse, because the author's solution, dropping any pretense at using a notionally "pluggable" API and just debugging with Wireshark, won't fly over HTTPS.

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Cannot sympathize with you enough. Had to go through this painful experience last year. I steadfastly refused to work with it again and we solved the problem in a roundabout manner. I'm sure .NET/Visual Studio experts think this a cakewalk, but for me there was no cake.

Try it with Fiddler.Should work fine over https.

No Windows boxes round these parts, or I would have. I tried WebScarab, but without the server certificate it was a lost cause (unless I missed a trick somewhere).

You have to generate a certificate for the proxy (WebScarab) and have the client trust it. The proxy will then act as a man-in-the-middle, presenting its own certificate to the client. See:

http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Generating_Custom_SSL_Certifi...

Now I know what to do if I ever find myself in that situation again. Thanks.

Charles proxy works on OS X and Linux.

Thanks for the fiddler tip - I also use Wireshark for most of my debugging needs and https always causes problems.

I'm going to check fiddler out too, but I've been using Charles proxy for the same thing if you need another way to see SSL.

Perhaps the fact that I was surprised that the article's author didn't immediately think of Fiddler is evidence of how exclusively I've worked with web services via .NET. Personally, I've had a great experience with SOAP from within Visual Studio. Once the service reference is established, all coding is against the strongly-typed code-generated classes. If I must, I use Fiddler to debug. My experience has been positive.

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