ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Creating a Generic Handler

The easiest way to create a new HTTP Handler is to create a Generic Handler. When you create a Generic Handler, you create a file that ends with the extension .ashx. Whenever you request the .ashx file, the Generic Handler executes.

You can think of a Generic Handler as a lightweight ASP.NET page. A Generic Handler is like an ASP.NET page that contains a single method that renders content to the browser. You can’t add any controls declaratively to a Generic Handler. A Generic Handler also doesn’t support events such as the Page Load or Page PreRender events.

In this section, we create a Generic Handler that dynamically generates an image from a string of text. For example, if you pass the string Hello World! to the ...