Luckily there’s a open source project hosted on CodePlex called WCF REST Contrib which, besides adding a whole lot of other improvements, solves the aforementioned issues. The project provides a sample solution showcasing all the features, which might seem a bit overwhelming since it includes quite some configuration. I have attached a sample project with only the bare minimum configuration (using attributes) to enable per operation authentication.

Browse to CancerService.svc/request/skincancer to test the authentication, the browser should display a prompt asking for a username and password. The username is “tony” and password “clifton”. Don’t mind the rather questionable service and operation name, I had no inspiration at the time.

The original documentation failed to mention that the per operation/service authentication depended on the WebErrorHandler, which has been corrected.

Attachment: Authentication Tryout

System.Security.SecurityException: Request for the permission of type ‘System.Configuration.ConfigurationPermission, System.Configuration, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a’ failed.

Using Jesus’ approach you’ll be greated by a nice Security Exception, for some reason you can’t configure the caching in the Web.Config in Medium Trust. Luckily you can add all the caching configuration as attributes to your method. You’ll have to remove the <caching> block from the Web.Config, but leave the aspNetCompatibilityEnabled tag enabled! Here’s an example:

Instead of using this XML configuration:

<caching>
   <outputCacheSettings>
      <outputCacheProfiles>
         <clear/>
         <add name="SampleProfile" duration="30" enabled="true" location="Any" />
      </outputCacheProfiles>
   </outputCacheSettings>
</caching>

We add these attributes, unfortunately you’ll have to add these attributes to every method you’d like to cache. There are more attributes available, you can see them using the IntelliSense, but this configuration mimics the XML config.

[AspNetCompatibilityRequirements(RequirementsMode = AspNetCompatibilityRequirementsMode.Allowed)]
public class SampleService : ISampleService
{
   [WebGet(UriTemplate= "/results")]
   [WebCache(Duration=30, Location=OutputCacheLocation.Any)]
   public Atom10FeedFormatter GetData()
   {
      ...
   }
}

Note: Tested in the ASP.NET Development Server provided by Visual Studio 2008 SP1. The OutputCacheLocation enum is located in the System.Web.UI namespace.

public void Init(HttpApplication context)
{
   context.BeginRequest += delegate
   {
      HttpContext ctx = HttpContext.Current;
      string path = ctx.Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath.ToLower();
 
      if (path.Contains("/service/"))
      {
         int i = path.IndexOf('/', 2);
         if (i > 0)
         {
            string service = path.Substring(0, i) + ".svc";
            string parameters = path.Substring(i, path.Length - i);
            ctx.RewritePath(service, parameters, string.Empty, false);
         }
      }
   };
}

In our case service would equals “~/service.svc” and the paramaters variable would equal “/user/john”.

Hooking the HTTPModule into the web.config is done in the system.web/httpmodules element. In this case the module class is called ServiceRedirector.

<system.web>
   <httpModules>  
      <add name="ServiceRedirector" type="ServiceRedirector"/>
   </httpModules>
</system.web>

The HTTPModule above could be extended to support multiple services, but I leave that as an exercise for the reader.