Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 3.5

Chapter 14. The HTTP Request Context

There are various steps involved in having the ASP.NET worker process serve an incoming HTTP request. The request is assigned to the aspnet_isapi.dll ISAPI extension which, in turn, hands it over to the HTTP runtime pipeline. The entry point in the ASP.NET pipeline is the HttpRuntime class. A new instance of this class is created for each request, governs its overall execution, and generates the response text for the browser. Upon instantiation, the HttpRuntime class performs a number of initialization tasks, the first of which is the creation of a wrapper object to encapsulate all the HTTP-specific information available about the request. The newly created object—an instance of the HttpContext class—is then ...