Apparently, Windows doesn’t use a network adapter at all when routing localhost to localhost traffic. Unfortunately, Wireshark alone doesn’t fix the problem. Wireshark doesn’t capture localhost to localhost traffic It has powerful filtering that lets you get down to exactly what you’re trying to find, so even though the initial data load is huge, you can drill down to the bits that are actually what you’re looking for. I’ve used it when trying to debug a UDP service, TCP service, HTTP service, basically any kind of service that accesses the web. Wireshark is a free tool that allows you to capture traffic.

As was the case here, Fiddler proved to be no help. That, and it always seems to mess up some other application that needs to access the web. I have used Fiddler in the past to look at web traffic, and with success… but it seems like it doesn’t work very well in Windows 10. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to set a breakpoint to view the raw message I was getting, so I set out trying to capture the packet and look at it that way. I mean, I know the basic concepts, but I have used just plain old HTTP RESTful services a lot more often. Admittedly, I don’t have a lot of experience with SOAP services. So I wanted to look at the actual data coming across the wire. Not sure why… everything should be working. I ran my web application, my client connected, my service got the request, sent back the response and… the client didn’t like it. Recently I had an issue where I was trying to create a stubbed/mocked version of a SOAP service locally.

Wireshark capture localhost traffic