Render PDFs inside Fiddler

Over the years, I’ve received several requests to extend Fiddler to support viewing PDF files directly within the debugger. PDF is a complicated binary format and it doesn’t work well with any of Fiddler’s default Inspectors, which are best suited to inspect web pages, images, and data formats like XML and JSON.

Fortunately, Fiddler’s powerful extension model permits developers to easily extend the tool to handle any data format, and I recently discovered that Telerik’s RadControls for WinForms library includes a PDF-rendering component. The library enabled me to build a PDF document viewing Inspector in just 80 lines of code, and it doesn’t require the user have any third-party PDF-viewer applications installed.

The new PDFView Inspector for Fiddler ( download here ) enables you to view PDF files directly within Fiddler’s Inspectors tab, whether you’re viewing a simple document:

…or a richly-formatted eBook:

The RadPdfViewer control supports all the features users expect, so you can search and print the document, copy/paste from it, zoom in/out, et cetera, all without requiring a single line of code on my part. If you’re interested, you can watch a quick-start video about the control here .

I hope you’ll find PDFView useful. If you have any questions about this new Inspector or the Telerik RadControls, please let me know!

-Eric Lawrence