why is use of "new NetworkCredential(username, password)" not working for Basic Authentication to my website (from a WinForms C# app)???

Question

Hi,

I have a website that uses Basic Authentication (username/password).

Why is the following code not working? When I run it the web application takes me to the login controller, whereas I'm expecting that it should already be authenticated given I'm populating the credentials. In other words I'm trying to confirm how, in .NET, I confirm my winforms HttpWebRequest so that it will automate the authentication process. I'm assumeing that NetworkCredential is the .net class that should do this? Or in .NET is there an expectation there is some manual two step process you have to implement yourself?

Here is the code:

    // Create a new webrequest to the mentioned URL.            
    var uri = new Uri("http://10.1.1.102:3000/download/sunset");
    var myWebRequest = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);            
    myWebRequest.PreAuthenticate=true;            
    var networkCredential=new NetworkCredential("test", "asdfasdf");                        
    myWebRequest.Credentials=networkCredential;
    var myWebResponse = (HttpWebResponse)myWebRequest.GetResponse();

    Console.Out.WriteLine("STATUS = " + myWebResponse.StatusCode);

    var stream = myWebResponse.GetResponseStream();
    var reader = new StreamReader(stream);
    string text_read = reader.ReadToEnd();
    Console.WriteLine(text_read);
    DisplayHtml(text_read);
    reader.Close();
    stream.Close();
    myWebResponse.Close();

Thanks

Answer 1

WebRequest does not send credential unless challenged by the site. The site should respond first 401 'Authorization Required' with an WWW-Authenticate header, the WebRequest will respond to the challenge with credentials and the service should respond with the 200 http content.

Shounds like the site does not implement Basic auth properly (the spec says it shoudl challenge first, to pass in the realm) which is a very common behavior. You can add the Basic authentication manually to the WebReauest.Headers colelction, which is what most developers end doing anyway.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1702426/httpwebrequest-not-passing-credentials/1702529#1702529