TCP Forwarder is a simple C# application that allows very basic TCP connection tunneling and monitoring. Specially designed for development environments.

Installation.

This application does not require installation, works as portable application, but require the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5 to be installed on the machine.

Usage.

Open the application, a default forwarder will be shown, depending on version latests forwarder will be maintained between sessions.

At left, the forwarders list, with all defined forwarders and relevant information shown.
Icon showing if the forwarder is active or not , the source port number at top left, and host address and destination port in lower line, additionally the icon  will appear on top right corner if the forwarder accepts only local connections.

Use buttons [Add] and [Delete] at bottom to manage this list.

Once a forwarder is selected the right panel will show details of the forwarder. At top the parameters configuration and a button to start the forwarder. Forwarder settings can’t change when active.

Below a row of buttons related to connections and information log. Button  clear the list of items, and  activates or deactivates the log change follow mode, that selects automatically the last item that have a change. Capture data check allow forwarders to record in RAM all the connection dialogs for later usage and at last a small report of connection status.

At the bottom of the panel a large list of items showing status messages, errors and connections identified by icons:

•  indicates a info log
•  indicates a error log. Commonly errors generated during connection management. Please inform by this errors on github for bug tracking.
•  indicates a new TCP connection. Take in mind this refer to a real TCP connection, ignoring protocol specifications. On HTTP protocol the TCP connections can be shared on multiple server calls depending on Connection: Keep-Alive header.
•  indicates (and update connection log) data is sending from source to destination.
•  indicates (and update connection log) data is being received from destination to source.
•  indicates (and update connection log) the connection has been finished for any of the two parts. This log entry will not be updated anymore.

Download.

This is free open software under the zlib license terms, you can download binaries from here:

• Download 1.2
  (Mar 10 2023)
• Download 1.1
  (Feb 07 2017)
• Download 1.0
   (Feb 02 2017)

Changes on version 1.2

• Better look of transmission blocks.
• Viewer for single data transfer.
• Allow save entire transmission block or single data transfer.
• Small bugfixes

Changes on version 1.1

• Now the list of forwarders will be saved automatically on a file in the same directory as TCPForwarder.exe.
  This avoids the need of rewrite the connections settings each time.
• Double click on a connection item on the left list will activate or deactivate it.
• Now the about button (bottom left) also displays all the machine local IPs for fast reference.
  
• All data transferred on the connections will be automatically registered inside the application, allowing user to see the TCP dialog between applications.
  
  The green message means data sent to server, and server responses on blue. The tree lines of numbers are: first the time of message since the beginning of the connection, later in grey, the time from the last message, and last the size of the message.

On version 1.1 is not possible to open details of a message, or save the entire conversation to disk. but it’s planned for future releases.

Evolve.

TCP Forwarder sources can be found on GitHub.