Why do I get a 403 error when calling a WCF Webservice?

Question

I'm really posting this question so that others searching for the answer can find it.

Scenario: WCF Service: Has worked fine at some point but currently is returning 403 errors. The web.config looks fine as far as I can tell. This machine has set the web.config to disable transport and message security and is using BasicHTTPBinding.

When I call it with my client generated from the Service Reference in Visual Studio, I get a 403 error. The error indicates there is some problem with the authentication, but as far as I can tell there is no such problem.

Answer 1

Http 403 error is "Forbidden". There is something that is blocking access.

In cases where it worked at one point and then stopped, it is often a windows update that has tightend up the security.

• Where is your WCF service installed?
• What are the ACL's on these files?
• What is the security context of your service? (Which account will be used to access the files)
• Does that user have access to the files?

Answer 2

To solve this problem, I used Fiddler to get the actual error code - in this case, a 403.1. This indicated that the executable for the service couldn't be run.

The actual problem ended up being that the ASP.NET version was set to 1.1, not 2.0+. So setting that to 2.0 resolved the 403 permission error.