I was recently tasked by my bosses to make some changes to a web service that existed on one of our clients sites. I’m not an ASP.NET guy – but it turned out to be what it was currently written in so I wanted to give it a shot and figured it would save me time on actually getting it done. That should have been my first clue that I was way off!

So I started off by having to upgrade the .NET library – the old app was written on version 1 something of .NET and the free Visual Web Developer forced it into an upgrade in order for me to even look at the code. I had tried using Eclipse first but that just have any way to compile out the ASP code. So after upgrading, we went through some hoops getting the server upgraded and also one crash of the IIS Server by not setting the DefaultAppPool properly. Like I said – not an ASP.NET guy!

So after that’s all compartmentalized, we start running into 401 – User Not Authorized problems. Turns out we had the server set to accept client certificates and were unable to connect through with them. Got that changed over and both the old service and the new seemed to be accepting the login scheme I copied over without a problem. When I went to run my new functionality though I just couldn’t get it to work. So I changed the name of my .asmx file from the default Service1 to NewService and went through the associated hoops trying to get everything running and compiling again. That was fun in and of itself. After uploading it, I could no longer connect when pointing to NewService. It seems that even though Service1 was in a different directory and application for ASP.NET when I was calling them – the SOAP URLs were pointing to the right places – that my calls to the app that now had NewService had been calling the Old Service1 instead.

So again I ran into the 401 Unauthorized problems. Started digging some more and there were a couple of things that I was able to finally find after much reading on the Internet. It seems that most suggest using anonymous browsing for the web service application directory. We couldn’t do that because of security requirements on the project, so we had it set to Integrated Windows Authentication under the Directory Security tab. However ColdFusion wasn’t able to talk to it then. Once I added Basic Authentication and gave it the proper domain, I was then able to connect like a champ and hit the newly created service!

So don’t forget to make sure your IIS Settings are what they should be, and then add to that the name changes. Now I just need to figure out how to create a test environment for this so that I can compile and make changes without taking down the service for the clients while they are working!