Friday 5 February 2010

Authentication error while communicating with web server

I started debugging one of our sites today after having a new 64 bit virtual machine with Windows 2003 Server installed on it. After setting up all websites, code, etc and when I pressed F5 on my Visual Studio 2008, I got the following error

"Unable to start debugging on the web server. An authentication error occurred while communicating with the web server"

Most of the answers on net point to doing an IISRESET and enabling HTTP Keep-alives, neither of which worked for me. But the following link proved to be useful and after carrying out the steps, it finally start working for me.

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=896861

Blogging it, as it might be useful for somebody else.

2 comments:

Loocie said...

Hello Hamid,

I found your blog via MSDN forums. A few years ago you wrote a post on the MSDN forums about a GPRS issue:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/netfxcompact/thread/80378a15-c51d-4760-8d8d-87c09d58064c

I am facing a similar issue on Windows Mobile 6.
Did you solve the problem?
I know it is a long time ago, but hopefully you remember a solution.
Thanks in advance.

All the best!

Cheers, Loocie

Hamid said...

Hi Loocie,

We eventually found the source of the problem as an error in the device itself.

We installed a firmware update from the vendor and it resolved the problem.

The error doesn't tell you a lot at the application level but try to enable diagnostics for all traffic passing through the modem. This allowed us to pinpoint the source of problem.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Hamid