Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 3.5

Writing HTTP Handlers

ASP.NET comes with a small set of built-in HTTP handlers. There is a handler to serve ASP.NET pages, one for Web services, and yet another to accommodate .NET Remoting requests for remote objects hosted by IIS. Other helper handlers are defined to view the tracing of individual pages in a Web application (trace.axd) and to block requests for prohibited resources such as .config or .asax files. Starting with ASP.NET 2.0, you also find a handler (webresource.axd) to inject assembly resources and script code into pages. In ASP.NET 3.5, the scriptresource.axd handler has been added as a more refined tool to inject script code and AJAX capabilities into Web pages.

You can write custom HTTP handlers whenever you need ASP.NET to ...