Units tests are all about testing a specific unit of code without any external dependencies. This makes the tests faster and less fragile, since there are no out-of-process calls and all dependencies are under the test's control. Of course, it's not always easy to remove all external dependencies. One such example is a WCF service using entity framework for database access in its operations.
HTTP protocol defines status codes as the means of informing the client about different error conditions on the server, but it can be beneficial to include additional information about the error. The best approach to it depends on the scenario.
If you've tried accessing an OData feed from a Windows Store apps you've already come across WCF Data Services Tools for Windows Store Apps. It's a downloadable package which extends the Add Service Reference functionality in Visual Studio 2012 to support OData feeds. Without it OData feeds can't be added as services references to a Windows Store app project.
Troubleshooting WCF services is often challenging, mostly because of cryptic and uninformative error messages. When you combine that with complex usage and configuration scenarios, it takes time to get to the bottom of the problem. The issue I'm about to describe manifested itself on a production server running a WCF service with HttpModule based Windows authentication. Other authentication methods worked fine, while with Windows authentication WCF returned a rather cryptic error message.
In a previous post I addressed the issue of using HTTP module based authentication in WCF. The presented solution worked in most cases but failed completely with Windows authentication. In this post I'll describe the necessary changes to make this work as well.
WCF has great built-in support for most types of authentication so there aren't many good reasons to use HTTP module based authentication with it. Having an existing ASP.NET application already using such authentication certainly is one of them. Finding resources on how to do it might be a challenge though. I managed to stumble upon an article by Microsoft patterns & practices team which helped a lot. In a way this post is its abridged and more practical version.