.NET application cannot connect to Finesse 11.6 on Windows 7

[kaitlyn.lafferty]

Hi -

We have a .net application that hosts Finesse (through browser control). On our Windows 7 OS, we are unable to connect to Finesse 11.6, we receive a the "Cannot authenticate with the Notification Service" error. We are able to connect when using IE 11. We are also able to connect with the .net application when Fiddler is running. We do have .net 4.7 installed and service pack 1 on windows.

has anyone experienced this type of error on windows 7?

thanks,

Katie

[shannonmccoy]

I am assuming you are using the Windows Forms browser control. 
If so its not actually using the current IE engine but and ActiveX control that wraps the lower level APIs that IE uses. Its a long complicated story but basically think of it as though you were running IE in "compatibility" mode as IE7 or IE9. You can see the same results if you hit F12 and look on the Emulation tab. You will see the Document Mode you are working in IE and can downgrade or upgrade the emulation of the browser. I have seen multiple customers where they have a default policy in their AD that defaults the Emulation to IE9 even when they have 11 and Edge installed. Anyway here is a good article on how to track down and fix version issues. 
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17922308/use-latest-version-of-internet-explorer-in-the-webbrowser-control 

I personally used the META tag fix on my own internal website by simply adding the meta tag below at the top of my web page which only works if you have control of the content. But it worked beautifully for me.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" >

 Here is a good article that explains the meta tag and what its for.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6771258/what-does-meta-http-equiv-x-ua-compatible-content-ie-edge-do

Bottom line its often tricky to use the Browser Control for modern web pages. Its not as maintained as other .NET stuff as its basically just a wrapper around their old ActiveX Browser control and not truly ".NET". I have spent many hours wrestling with this stuff over the years and I using basically the same ActiveX control back in 1999 if that tells you how dated the control is. There have been updates but its not a dev priority at MS. 
Another option you can try if it gets to be too much to bear to keep working with it is to try using Chromium instead. Visual Studio code is written with Electron which is JavaScript running in Chromium like a native app. Slack and Skype are also written with the same platform so you know its current and better supported. Away I hope this helps and I was assuming correctly. Because when you make an assumption you make an ass out of U and ... uh ... "mption".  I guess.... hmm that doesn't seem right... oh well, cheers.
Shannon