When you just use IE, Firefox or Chrome it can be easy to forget that HTTP is about more then just going to check the latest tech news at Engadget. It is a full and rich protocol, and a great way to experience that richness is the powerful command line utility cURL.

cURL has a lot of options, but the syntax starts out simple. You can retrieve the contents of a web page with a simple curl http://blogs.claritycon.com/. The results should be the full text of the web page, tags and all. From there, you can use X to specify the HTTP verb to use, POST, PUT, DELETE, PATCH, etc and d to specify the payload of a POST or PUT.

I have found cURL to be incredibly useful for two scenarios. First, as a good way to test basic web services. Second, while working a bit with CouchDB and another document based database, cURL has helped me learn more about RESTful APIs, including different verbs and response codes.

cURL is a mainstay in our environments and programming languages precisely because it is simple, powerful and discoverable. I encourage more .NET developers to take a look, bask on the command line for a while and enjoy the plain text of the web. And this excellent logo:

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Its not always the case with manuals, but the manual for cURL is quite useful: http://curl.haxx.se/docs/manual.html

To make your command line look a little nicer (and more powerful) on Windows, check out Console and add some transparency effects: http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/

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