Discuss ASP.NET in the context of non-blocking servers

[paulbatum]

Great writeup! But it would be even better if you could discuss ASP.NET in the section about non-blocking servers. Do you consider ASP.NET to be a non blocking server? Is implementing IHttpAsyncHandler enough? If not, why not?

[mythz]

Hi Paul,

Agreed that ASP.NET does have IHttpAsyncHandler (and MVC's newer IAsyncController) though this feature had been hidden by ASP.NET's Web Forms and Prior to F#/C# 5/.NET 4.0s TPL async sugar (i.e. stuck with the APM model) it was too awkward to develop against and the lack of any real attention by MSDN meant it's effectively ignored by the general ASP.NET populace (except for the specific few use-cases that warrant it).

Although the situation has recently improved with a new emphasis on Async programming and things like IISNode.
I should go back and expand on IIS/ASP.NET's async story here, do you know of any good MS/MSDN documentation I can point to for devs wanting to start out with IHttpAsyncHandler/IAsyncController?

[mvreg]

Hi mythz

Don't know any special documentation, however any basic example with Servicestack.Redis and async http handler would be really great.

[mythz]

@dlogar Actually @marcgravell's BookSleeve would be more appropriate for use with IHttpAsyncHandler since it's an async Redis client. i.e. you can have async end-to-end

[mythz]

Hey @paulbatum I'm not sure if I made myself clear but I was waiting on some documentation links to IHttpAsyncHandler / IAsyncController I can link to. Do you have any on hand?

[paulbatum]

Hey sorry for the delay, I googled around a bit but didn't find anything that looked authoritive and up to date so I asked someone at work for a good resource but they didn't get back to me. Still trying to chase it up.

[paulbatum]

There are some changes coming in ASP.NET 4.5 that make the async story even nicer. Hopefully there will be some good documentation to go along with it. If I come across some, I'll link to it from here.

[mythz]

Great, I'll stay tuned to this channel then :)