Perhaps the fact that I was surprised that the article's author didn't immediately think of Fiddler is evidence of how exclusively I've worked with web services

Perhaps the fact that I was surprised that the article's author didn't immediately think of Fiddler is evidence of how exclusively I've worked with web services via .NET. Personally, I've had a great experience with SOAP from within Visual Studio. Once the service reference is established, all coding is against the strongly-typed code-generated classes. If I must, I use Fiddler to debug. My experience has been positive.