Wishing for Orcas: IIS marries ASP.NET

Note: this entry has moved.

I want IIS to finally marry ASP.NET, once and for all. I’m looking forward to much more than the current integration that exist today between ASP.NET v1.1 and IIS6 where you’ve to deal with a lot of duplicate functionality.

Take for instance authentication: you’ve got IIS authentication and ASP.NET authentication, this could be integrated in a way that setting authentication for a website could be done in one shot and without leaving room for any confusion.

Session state management, extension mappings and custom errors are just other duplicate features. Let’s take custom errors: IIS configuration offers its very own “Custom Errors” tab for mapping HTTP error codes to files while ASP.NET has a <customErrors> element that you can set in your web app config file. They both do exactly the same thus they’re different, separate features.

But what I would like the most to see unified is the HTTP pipeline, definitely. This is currently also duplicated in IIS and ASP.NET and you’re forced to make a hard choice. You may go down to the metal ISAPI route, where you can write really high-performing extensions and modules while loosing the easy access to key ASP.NET services like caching OR you can go the ASP.NET way of writing handlers and modules having easy access to all offered services but loosing on the performance side of the equation.

And finally, do we really need to have different names for IIS and ASP.NET?