HTTP DELETE request

Question

I'm attempting to do an HTTP DELETE in C# from my code behind and am unable to do this. After looking at the members of the WebRequestMethods.Http type, i'm not even sure that this is possible.

Here is my code:

try
{
    HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("http://localhost/NameFiles/00000.txt");
    request.Method = "DELETE";
    request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
    HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();

    if (response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
    {
        // some code
    }
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    ex.ToString();
}

Running this from my development environment I get: "The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized."

I have received a different result on a server that I assume has something to do with settings in IIS: "The remote server returned an error: (501) Not Implemented."

Also, as I mentioned in a comment to an answer below, I am able to send DELETE requests from a classic asp page using vbscript on the same server to the same location as the request from my aspx page using c#. Why would these be different?

Answer 1

1. You should remove Content-Type header which is useless here.
2. Check if you are using IIS and if files/ folder that you are trying to delete has rights to delete. These are the user that I can think of: The IUSR or IUSR_MachineName account. The IIS_IUSRS or IIS_WPG group.
3. For 501 error return - PUT, DELETE , OPTIONS are not enabled by default. Hence, you need to enable at web server level.

You should make sure that the following configurations are there in the config file. You can also see some other post related with delete. (modify below settings that suites your environment).

 <handlers>
      <remove name="WebDAV" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_64bit" />
      <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_32bit" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness32" responseBufferLimit="0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-ISAPI-4.0_64bit" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" modules="IsapiModule" scriptProcessor="%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\aspnet_isapi.dll" preCondition="classicMode,runtimeVersionv4.0,bitness64" responseBufferLimit="0" />
      <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" path="*." verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS" type="System.Web.Handlers.TransferRequestHandler" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
    </handlers>