更新WCF服务参考时出现401未经授权的错误

Question

We have a WCF service hosted through IIS8 on our internal company network. The service has anonymous authentication disabled & only Windows authentication is enabled. When accessing the service in a browser, a dialog pops up asking for domain credentials. Once valid credentials are supplied, the service comes up successfully.

I am now trying to update a service reference in a project in Visual Studio 2013 to this service. The original reference was created before the changes were made to the authentication. Now, when trying to perform the reference update, I get a 401 Unauthorized error, as Visual Studio is trying to pass anonymous authentication credentials & it is failing.

Is there a way that we can update these references with the current configuration? I have access to the server & can temporarily switch on anonymous authentication, but not all our developers will be able to do so. I'd have expected Visual Studio to provide a prompt for credentials, but this does not seem to be the case...

Answer 1

So the error I was given did not reflect the underlying cause. The service I was attempting to update a reference for, had something go wrong during its deployment. This lead to the .svc file not making it onto the server.

While I expected this to result in a 404 error, rather a 401 was returned. Once we had redeployed the service, I was able to update the service reference with windows authentication turned on. Go figure...