Simon Fell¹ is venting about the lack of true streaming reads in ASP.NET. I agree, it really sucks that everything gets buffered.

I'm not quite clear why this is the way it is. After all, if you look at what is basically the lowest layer of the CLR based ASP.NET runtime, HttpWorkerRequest, you can see it has a ReadEntityBody method which would appear to enable a streaming read scenario. Underneath the covers, I would imagine Microsoft's concrete implementation could reach back into their native ISAPI extension and leverage IIS' ISAPI server support functions HSE_REQ_IO_COMPLETION and HSE_REQ_ASYNC_READ_CLIENT to get the job of an asycnhronus streaming read done.

Hopefully someone from the ASP.NET team can comment on this. The public, well at least two of us anyway, is dying to get streaming reads within the ASP.NET environment. For now, ISAPI is the only way to go.

¹ Correction, I originally said Sam Ruby, but I meant Simon Fell. For some reason, I have no clue why, I always confuse those two names. Sorry Simon and Sam. ;)