I have a Silverlight 5 app that runs on a SharePoint 2007 site. The Silverlight app gets a bunch of data from SharePoint lists using the Lists.asmx service. The main site is secured using NTLM security and Silverlight is able to successfully call the web services without having to eplicitly set anything to do with authentication. We extended the SharePoint site to a second domain that uses asp.net FormsBasedAuthentication. On this version of the site, the first web service call fails with a 403 Forbidden response and the exception:
System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: The remote server returned an error: NotFound. ---> System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: NotFound. ---> System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: NotFound.
As I understand it, this is a generic message and not the true exception. Well, obviously we need the real exception to have any idea what the problem is. This MSDN page (Creating and Handling Faults in Silverlight) offers two solutions to getting the real exception.
The first is to modify your WCF service to return an alternate HTTP status code. This doesn't work because for one, it is not a WCF service, it's an .asmx web service so I can't add the suggested WCF behavior to modify the status code. Second, it's SharePoint's service so I can't do much to modify it anyway. Could I modify IIS to achieve an equivalent solution somehow?
The second solution is to register an alternative HTTP stack in the Silverlight application. I tried this out and found out the "real" exception was an authentication exception. So I went down dead ends trying to figure out out to get authenticated for about 24 hours only to finally find out that normally, the ASP.NET authentication cookie is passed with the service request, unless you are using the Client HTTP stack. So registering the client HTTP stack allowed me to see real exceptions, but it created its own exception which seems to only be fixed by not using the Client HTTP stack...
I believe have verified with Fiddler that the authentication cookie is being sent when using the default HTTP stack. I don't know if the Lists.asmx service is unable to use it and is giving an authentication error anyway, or if there is some other exception. How can I determine the cause of the "The remote server returned an error: NotFound." exception?