Ran into a bit of an issue today when an application I developed stopped working. Fortunately I built a pretty awesome tracing framework that I often drop into all my applications that lets me get at important runtime information from within the application. In this case I was able to see the WCF Data Services query that was being sent. It looked fine. The problem was that the response couldn’t be deserialized.
So I pasted the query into IE and saw this.
Ahh great so the XML is malformed. That explains why the WCF Data Services client library can’t give me any useful information. Now I could go to the trouble of using Fiddler or FiddlerCap but in this case there’s a much simpler way.
Start Notepad » File » Open » Paste the URL
I admit I only found this out recently that our old friend Notepad could be used to open HTTP URL’s.
In this case the error was due to the fact that the database I am working with is a train wreck that lacks any constraints so the integrity of the data was violated. That’s a different issue altogether and one that’s out of my hands, unfortunately.
Huh. That’s very cool. Thanks for the tip