In Germany was „Father’s Day“ today – well I am not a father – but I took this general bank holiday to do a “Spelunking Day”.

I always wondered how ASP.NET 2.0 integrates now into the radical new IIS7 pipeline model. So armed with Reflector and the Visual Studio debugger, I made some interesting observations.

The key to all this is that the .NET Framework version has changed from .42 to .88 on Vista. This makes it possible to add some ASP.NET plumbing for IIS7, e.g.

• A new HttpWorkerRequest derived class is used for ASP.NET/IIS7 communication – System.Web.Hosting.IIS7WorkerRequest. This uses the new IIS7 API internally to throw the request information “over the fence”.
• The IIS7TraceListener class allows using the new IIS 7 Tracing features from within ASP.NET
• A new pipeline event has been introduced called LogRequest/PostLogRequest – this stage is used to log the results of the request, and is guaranteed to execute even if errors occur.
• Modules can now inspect and manipulate the Response and Cookies collection on HttpResponse. Even if those headers and cookies were created by non ASP.NET code.
• The HttpRequest.Headers collection is now write-enabled, allowing modules to manipulate the incoming request headers.
• The HttpRequest.ServerVariables collection is also now writeable, allowing IIS server variables to be set. ASP.NET modules can use this functionality to change IIS provided values, and create new server variables that will be visible to other application frameworks, like classic ASP or PHP.

Now back to some real work…