Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 4

Chapter 16. The HTTP Request Context

All great things are simple, and many can be expressed in single words.

— Winston Churchill

Each ASP.NET request goes hand in hand with a companion object for its entire lifetime—an instance of the HttpContext class. The HttpContext object wraps up all the HTTP-specific information available about the request. It is then used by the various HTTP modules and used to group references to intrinsic worker objects such as Request, Response, and Server.

In this chapter, we’ll first review the startup process of the ASP.NET application and then move on to examine the various objects that form the context of the HTTP request.

Initialization of the Application

Each ASP.NET request is carried out by an ASP.NET application ...