SharePoint Dragons

Andrew Connell has written this great blog post about doing advanced workflow debugging in SharePoint 2013 by leveraging the free HTTP traffic monitoring tool Fiddler. Using an HTTP monitoring tool for workflow debugging purposes makes a lot of sense for two reasons:

• SharePoint 2013 leverages Windows Azure Workflow (WAW) to provide SharePoint 2013 workflows. Both components communicate via HTTPS/SSL.
• SharePoint 2013 workflows are declarative and don’t allow developers to add custom code. Instead, developers have to either create custom actions or use the new HTTP workflow activities to call custom WCF services.

Because of these two reasons, the amount of HTTP traffic that happens under water when executing workflows increases dramatically. Hence, Fiddler becomes a useful workflow debugging tool. Check out the good stuff at: http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/archive/2012/07/18/sharepoint-2013-workflow-advanced-workflow-debugging-with-fiddler.aspx.