title: Sending message with 401: Asp.net Web-api
body: <p>I am in asp.net web API. In login method I check the user/password against the db and if they do not match, I return 401 status code along with <code>invalid user or password method</code> like</p>
  
  <pre><code>var content = new StringContent("Invalid user name or password");
  var message = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized);
  message.Content = content;
  throw new HttpResponseException(message);
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But API seems to ignore my message and simply return some HTML like</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"&gt;
  &lt;html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"&gt;
  &lt;head&gt;
  &lt;meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/&gt;
  &lt;title&gt;401 - Unauthorized: Access is denied due to invalid credentials.&lt;/title&gt;
  &lt;style type="text/css"&gt;
  &lt;!--
  body{margin:0;font-size:.7em;font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;background:#EEEEEE;}
  fieldset{padding:0 15px 10px 15px;} 
  h1{font-size:2.4em;margin:0;color:#FFF;}
  h2{font-size:1.7em;margin:0;color:#CC0000;} 
  h3{font-size:1.2em;margin:10px 0 0 0;color:#000000;} 
  #header{width:96%;margin:0 0 0 0;padding:6px 2% 6px 2%;font-family:"trebuchet MS", Verdana, sans-serif;color:#FFF;
  background-color:#555555;}
  #content{margin:0 0 0 2%;position:relative;}
  .content-container{background:#FFF;width:96%;margin-top:8px;padding:10px;position:relative;}
  --&gt;
  &lt;/style&gt;
  &lt;/head&gt;
  &lt;body&gt;
  &lt;div id="header"&gt;&lt;h1&gt;Server Error&lt;/h1&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;div id="content"&gt;
   &lt;div class="content-container"&gt;&lt;fieldset&gt;
    &lt;h2&gt;401 - Unauthorized: Access is denied due to invalid credentials.&lt;/h2&gt;
    &lt;h3&gt;You do not have permission to view this directory or page using the credentials that you supplied.&lt;/h3&gt;
   &lt;/fieldset&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;/body&gt;
  &lt;/html&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Why is that? How can I override this?</p>