Basic authentication HttpWebRequest fails with error 401 for DefaultNetworkCredentials

Question

I am testing an application with a local web server (IIS, Windows 8), the site requires basic authentication, and as long as I explicitly pass my credentials, everything works fine:

request.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("User", "Password", "Domain"); request.PreAuthenticate = true; 

But I would like to use the built-in protection, so I tried changing the first line as follows:

 request.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultNetworkCredentials; 

(I also tried DefaultCredentials)

I checked the network traffic with Fiddler and I see that in the second case the Http request is sent without an authorization header, so it is not surprising that it fails. But why?

UPDATE I believe that I misunderstood the concept of default credentials. DefaultNetworkCredentials cannot be used to generate the main authentication header, it must be a pair of users / passwords. So this is by design.

Answer 1

Thanks to the people who commented on this topic, I realized that I misunderstood the concept of default credentials. They cannot be used in this case, then only basic authentication is enabled, therefore this is the correct behavior.