System.ServiceModel.AddressAccessDeniedException: HTTP could not register URL

Windows Vista or later version of windows operating systems has a new security setting that restricts users to run service with default administrative privilege. As a consequence people are migrating or developing in VISTA or Win 7 or Windows 2008 server might encounter the following exception.

HTTP could not register URL http://+:8000/. Your process does not have access rights to this namespace (see http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=70353 for details).

The exception is thrown due to violation of enforced security settings in the above mentioned operating system. This restricts your ability to run Http web service as you are no longer allowed to listen to particular HTTP port unless you have given the appropriates rights.

In these latest versions of operating systems, every HTTP is reserved for use by the system administrator. If you don’t run your service with administrator privilege you will get AddressAccessDeniedException. So in development context when you are running the service using visual studio and the debugger by default that doesn’t run under the context of administrator. Thus you will get this exception. The plus sign in the URL just means that there’s a wildcard being applied to the hostname.

How to fix this issue?

To fix this issue, Administrator has to delegate the ownership of HTTP namespace to the user account that is running the service or the application. To perform this, you need start a command prompt with Administrator privilege (Run As Administrator). Then use Netsh.exe to give the user Administrative rights on Http namespace . Netsh.exe  is a tool provided by Windows Operating System for administrator to configure and monitor Windows-based computers at a command prompt.  

To look at the existing HTTP namespace delegations use the following command.

“netsh http show urlacl”.

To add administrator privilege on Http namespace for a specific user use the following command.

“netsh http add urlacl url=http://+:8000/ user=DOMAIN\UserName”

After running the command start the service again to findout your service running with appropriate permissions.