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?