Many developers are familiar only with the high-level .NET frameworks like Web Forms and Web services that sit at the very top level of the ASP.NET hierarchy. This article discusses the lower-level aspects of ASP.NET and explains how requests move from Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime and then through the ASP.NET HTTP pipeline to process requests.
by Rick Strahl
January 5, 2006
nderstanding how ASP.NET really works under the covers can help you make decisions that can make your ASP.NET applications better. Understanding the innards of a platform always provides me with a certain satisfaction and level of comfort, as well as insight that helps me write better applications. Knowing what tools are available and how they fit together as part of the whole complex framework makes it easier to find the best solution to a problem and, more importantly, helps in troubleshooting and debugging of problems when they occur. The goal of this article is to look at ASP.NET from the system level to help you understand how requests flow into the ASP.NET processing pipeline. You'll look at the core engine and how Web requests end up there. Much of this information is not something that you need to know in your daily work, but it's good to understand how the ASP.NET architecture routes requests into your application code that usually sits at a much higher level.
Most people using ASP.NET are familiar with Web Forms and Web services. These high level implementations are abstractions that make it easy to build Web-based application logic and ASP.NET is the driving engine that provides the underlying interface to the Web server and routing mechanics to provide the base for these high level front end services typically used for your applications. Web Forms and Web services are merely two very sophisticated implementations of HTTP handlers built on top of the core ASP.NET framework.
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nderstanding how ASP.NET really works under the covers can help you make decisions that can make your ASP.NET applications better. Understanding the innards of a platform always provides me with a certain satisfaction and level of comfort, as well as insight that helps me write better applications. Knowing what tools are available and how they fit together as part of the whole complex framework makes it easier to find the best solution to a problem and, more importantly, helps in troubleshooting and debugging of problems when they occur. The goal of this article is to look at ASP.NET from the system level to help you understand how requests flow into the ASP.NET processing pipeline. You'll look at the core engine and how Web requests end up there. Much of this information is not something that you need to know in your daily work, but it's good to understand how the ASP.NET architecture routes requests into your application code that usually sits at a much higher level.
