Passing NetworkCredential to HttpWebRequest in C# from ASP.Net Page

I’m trying to use HTTPWebRequest to access a web service, and am having problems passing credentials in, see code below. I can see the credentials object, nc, being built in the debugger, and also in the assignment to request.Credentials, but when I get to the last line of code it faults with a not authorized error message. I’ve had our server folks watch the request on the server, and there are no credentials being passed. Am I doing something wrong with the Credentials object, or is there something I need to do that I’m not doing here?

Uri requestUri = null;
Uri.TryCreate("https://mywebserver/webpage"), 
    UriKind.Absolute, out requestUri);

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create
    (requestUri);

NetworkCredential nc =
    new NetworkCredential("user", "password");

request.Credentials = nc;

request.Method = WebRequestMethods.Http.Get;
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

The NetworkCredentials are either extremely non-intuitive, or flaky, or both. Regardless, you can solve the issue by bypassing NetworkCredentials altogether and use this method (which I found, courtesy of mark.michaelis.net)

/* http://mark.michaelis.net/Blog/CallingWebServicesUsingBasicAuthentication.aspx */
byte[] credentialBuffer = new UTF8Encoding().GetBytes(username + ":" +password);
req.Headers["Authorization"] ="Basic " + Convert.ToBase64String(credentialBuffer);

So what you’re doing is manually creating a header for your HttpWebRequest and inserting the content as it would appear in a Basic Authentication header. Works like a charm.

Method 2

Microsoft Premier Support finally helped me solve this problem by using the CredentialCache class to add the Credentials and the “Basic” authorization:

NetworkCredential nc =
    new NetworkCredential(GetSetting("username"), GetSetting("password"));
CredentialCache cache = new CredentialCache();

cache.Add(requestUri, "Basic", nc);

HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(requestUri);

Method 3

It helped me (for Unity3d mono, not ASP.Net):

request.PreAuthenticate = true;

Do not need manual set Authorization header or use CredentialCache.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0