About two articles on ASP.NET Pipeline and ASP.NET XML Web Services
I came across two new articles on MSDN. Well, I must say they both are very informative and partly give new insights for me (mostly the first one).
Fritz Onion: ASP.NET Pipeline - Use Threads and Build Asynchronous Handlers in Your Server-Side Web Code
Fortunately for developers, threading in ASP.NET is a lot easier than it was in ASP. In this article, the author takes a look at threading in the ASP.NET HTTP pipeline, and explains how threads are managed efficiently without the involvement of the developer. The article considers how the common language runtime threadpool is used by ASP.NET to service requests, looks at the pooling mechanisms used for handlers, modules, and applications, and covers both IIS 5.0 and IIS 6.0 and how they differ in their approach to request processing and thread allocation. Finally, how and when to use asynchronous handlers is discussed for developers who still need to use threads in their own applications.
Aaron Skonnard: How ASP.NET Web Services Work
See how Microsoft ASP.NET Web services methods (WebMethods) provide a high-productivity approach to building Web services. WebMethods can expose traditional Microsoft .NET methods as Web service operations that support HTTP, XML, XML Schema, SOAP, and WSDL. The WebMethod (.asmx) handler automatically dispatches incoming SOAP messages to the appropriate method and automatically serializes the incoming XML elements into corresponding .NET objects.