A problem I’ve had for a while:

Running an application from Visual Studio 2013 without administrator privileges and trying to start a WCF service results in a HttpListenerException.

My service host’s URI was http://localhost:8000.

The problem goes away when Studio is started with Administrator:

But that’s a pain for me for a variety of reasons.

I googled and found lots of information on stackoverflow. I tried to use the developer-reserved Design_Time_Addresses solution on port 8732, and then on 8731, but to no avail.

So then I figured how to look for this URL on my PC. From a command shell run:

netsh http show urlacl

Then I spotted the design time addresses URL:

Port 8733 !

So I changed my URI to http://localhost:8733/Design_Time_Addresses and everything worked.

This new URI is only for use when running the service in a debugged session via Visual Studio. For normal runtime use I still use the original URI of http://localhost:8000.

Update: I’m now using the following property to get the URI at runtime:

static public string ServerPath
{
    get
    {
        string serverPath = "http://localhost:8000";

        if (System.Diagnostics.Debugger.IsAttached == true)
        {
            serverPath = "http://localhost:8733/Design_Time_Addresses";
        }

        return serverPath;
    }
}