As we're nearing the opening ceremonies for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games, our team is busy testing failure and recovery scenarios. We want to ensure that even if something goes wrong in our video delivery stream, users will have as seamless an experience as possible, and will have their video quickly and automatically restored. In the event that a catastrophic failure occurs in the video delivery stream, we make several attempts to automatically re-connect to resolve the problem:
Failing that, we provide a means to manually retry the reconnection attempt, or to simply browse to other video content.
In order to test the different scenarios that can lead to these kinds of errors, we often use Fiddler as a debugging tool. We often use the Autoresponder feature to return "502 Unavailable" responses to requests for valid, working video chunks in order to trigger these error scenarios for testing purposes. The other day, I encountered a situation where I needed to trigger an error in full-screen mode. As you may know, in Silverlight full screen mode, clicking on another application outside the full screen Silverlight app will exit full screen mode. I needed to trigger a video failure via Fiddler in full screen mode, but could not use Fiddler without exiting full screen and invalidating my test.
The solution to this problem is to use Fiddler on another computer as a remote proxy. This allowed me to do anything I wanted on my main computer, controlling the responses to the network traffic on another machine. Thanks to Olga Lepekhina and David Woods for pointing me to this solution.
To make it work, open up Fiddler on another computer on your network. Open up Tools -> Fiddler Options, and open the Connections tab. Check the box for "Allow remote computers to connect", and restart Fiddler:
On your main computer, go to Internet Explorer's Internet Options and click the LAN settings button on the Connection tab. Check the "Use a proxy server for your LAN" box. You can then enter the IP address of the other machine (the one running Fiddler), along with port 8888. (You may need to click the Advanced button to enter these settings).
This works in Firefox too, via a similar procedure:
