Help: How to enable Windows Authentication on ASP.NET Development Server?

Question

I hope any of you guys knows how to fix this issue we are having.

We are trying to host a WCF service via the web. We set the web.config to have the service require windows authentication. The problem we are having is the following:

When we host our service in a regular IIS, the service runs fine and there is no issues with the "Windows Authentication" mode. However, when we try to run it from our developer boxes we get the following error: "Security settings for this service require Windows Authentication but it is not enabled for the IIS application that hosts this service."

Our developers boxes are not hosting the service through the regular IIS but rather through Visual Studio's APS.NET Development Server. We tried going into the web project properties and said to enable NTLM authentication but that still did not fix it. Does anyone know how to fix it? Does VS ASP.NET Development Server even support Windows Authentication? Is the only option for hosting the service with Windows Authentication is to use IIS and forget about ASP.NET Development Server?

Thanks Chuck

Answer 1

ASP.Net Development Server is very limited. It only serves requests originating from the same machine that it is running on, and it will not serve files that are outside of its application scope. It is based on the Cassini server. Cassini does not support WCF web services. Documentation for ASP.Net Development Server says that it does support NTLM. If you are just browsing to a page from the local machine it should work fine unless the page is referencing an unavailable resource.

check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/58wxa9w5.aspx for more info.

Answer 2

I would install and configure IIS on your local dev machine and use that in preference to using the inbuilt webserver. To use local IIS to debug select "User Local IIS web server" on the web tab of the project properties. Using IIS rather than the inbuilt webserver also means that you can configure your app in exactly the same way as it will be configured on the production server and this will reduce the no of potential surprises when you move to the production environment.