Professional IIS 7 and ASP.NET Integrated Programming

Chapter 8. Extending the Integrated Request Processing Pipeline

This chapter shows you how to implement and how to plug configurable managed handlers, handler factories, and modules into the IIS 7 and ASP.NET integrated request processing pipeline to extend this integrated pipeline to add support for custom configurable request processing capabilities. I present the discussions in the context of several practical examples that you can use in your own Web applications.

Extending the Integrated Pipeline through Managed Code

One of the great architectural advantages of the new IIS 7 and ASP.NET integrated request processing pipeline is its extensibility through managed code. In general, there are three main ways to extend the IIS 7 and ASP.NET integrated request processing pipeline through managed code: you can write a managed module, handler, or handler factory and plug it into the IIS 7 and ASP.NET integrated request processing pipeline to extend the pipeline to add support for new request processing capabilities.

A managed handler is an ASP.NET object responsible for handling or processing requests for ASP.NET resources with particular file extensions. For example, the managed handler that processes requests for an ASP.NET page (a resource with file extension .aspx) is an instance of a class that directly or indirectly derives from the ASP.NET Page class.

The ASP.NET parser automatically parses the requested ASP.NET page into a dynamically generated class that inherits from the ASP.NET ...