ASP.NET in a Nutshell

Chapter 18. The HttpServerUtility Class

The HttpServerUtility class is ASP.NET’s replacement for ASP’s intrinsic Server object. Because the Server property of the Page class (from which all pages are derived) exposes the HttpServerUtility class instance for a given ASP.NET page, you can code to the HttpServerUtility class as you did in the Server object in classic ASP, meaning that your existing ASP code is much easier to migrate.

The HttpServerUtility class performs utility functions such as encoding and decoding strings for use in URLs or for plain-text display of content that may contain HTML markup tags. The HttpServerUtility class also provides access to limited error information and provides methods (Execute, Transfer) for modifying the execution of the current request. Table 18-1 lists the properties and methods exposed by the HttpServerUtility class.

Table 18-1. HttpServerUtility class summary

Properties	Collections	Methods (public instance)
MachineName	None	ClearError
ScriptTimeout		CreateObject
		CreateObjectFromClsid
		Execute
		GetLastError
		HtmlDecode
		HtmlEncode
		MapPath
		Transfer
		UrlDecode
		UrlEncode
		UrlPathEncode

Comments/Troubleshooting

In classic ASP, the Server object was used to create COM component instances by using the Server.CreateObject method. CreateObject still exists in ASP.NET, along with a new method, CreateObjectFromClsid, which uses a COM class ID (CLSID) instead of a ProgID to locate the object to create. ...