title: self hosted asp.net webapi basic authentication no 401 returned on windows 2008
body: <p>I have developed a self hosted asp.net webapi service that uses basic authentication using message handlers (similar to this: <a href="http://www.piotrwalat.net/basic-http-authentication-in-asp-net-web-api-using-message-handlers/" rel="nofollow">http://www.piotrwalat.net/basic-http-authentication-in-asp-net-web-api-using-message-handlers/</a>).  When I run this from my workstation (win 7 x64), the client consumes as expected.  When I run this on the intended server (win 2008), the client fails with error code 500.  After a bit of digging and network tracing, it looks like the (working) win 7 box initially responds with 401 as expected, but the win 2008 box doesn't respond at all, it just drops the connection (the client reports this as 500).</p>
  
  <p>I've setup a remote debug on the server, and there's not even a stack track to go on.  It looks to me like maybe I'm missing some component on the server that is causing an exception somewhere deep in the asp.net webapi code, but I can't tell for sure.</p>
  
  <p>I'm not quite sure where to go from here.  The only next step I can think of is to run procmon against it and see if it comes up with any 'file-not-found' type entries for dll's.</p>