Overview Of ASP.NET Architecture By SPEC INDIA

Online, July 10, 2012 (Newswire.com) - ASP.NET is a powerful platform for building Web applications, which provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and power for building just about any kind of Web application. In this article we will describe the lower level aspects of ASP.NET and explain how requests move from Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime, and so on.
By definition, ASP.NET is a sophisticated engine using Managed Code for front to back processing of Web Requests. It's much more than just WebForms and Web Services...

Knowing what tools are available and how they fit together as part of the whole complex framework makes it easier to find the best solution to a problem and more importantly helps in troubleshooting and debugging of problems when they occur. The goal of this article is to look at ASP.NET from the System level and help understand how requests flow into the ASP.NET processing pipeline.

Getting into the .NET runtime; the actual entry points into the .NET Runtime occur through a number of undocumented classes and interfaces. Little is known about these interfaces outside of Microsoft, and Microsoft folks are not eager to talk about the details, as they deem this an implementation detail that has little effect on developers building applications with ASP.NET.
HttpModules & web.config file; as requests move through the pipeline a number of events fire on the HttpApplication object. ASP.NET Developers are aware that these events are published as event methods in Global.asax.

This approach is application specific though which is not always what you want. If you want to build generic HttpApplication event hooks that can be plugged into any Web applications you can use HttpModules which are reusable and don't require application specific code except for an entry in web.config.