Chapter 4. HTTP Pipeline

ASP.NET is built on top of an extensible HTTP request processing architecture known as the HTTP pipeline. Every time you author a new .aspx page, you are defining a new endpoint to service a request. The page, however, is just the last class in a series of classes that are used to process each request.

This chapter covers the details of the HTTP pipeline, beginning with a detailed look at how a request is routed through the various pieces of the architecture and ultimately dispatched to your page. We then look at the three primary points of extensibility in the pipeline: defining custom application classes, building custom modules, and writing custom handlers. The chapter concludes with a look at threading and pooling in the pipeline, discussing both the resource management of ASP.NET and the implications of threading for your applications.