ASP.NET without IIS

Christian Langreiter cites a fascinating article by Ted Neward entitled Hosting ASP.NET: Running an All-Managed HTTP Server :

We examine how to host the ASP.NET runtime (called the HttpRuntime stack, or just HttpRuntime) by looking at the source code to an all-managed HTTP server Microsoft provides, code-named Cassini. [Ted Neward]

Interesting in light of Simon Fell's comment on an IIS-related buffer overflow. " Wasn't .NET supposed to stop this sort of thing?" asked Simon. Wrote Drew Marsh:

Yes, and it does, however the piece of code that is affected with the buffer overrun is an unmanaged component of the ASP.NET ISAPI extension. Still, I'm disappointed that this wasn't caught by new security practices that were supposed to have been in place already at Microsoft before .NET was released. [ Drew's Blog ]

Although Cassini (which, Christian points out, comes with ASP.NET Matrix) is not, as Ted says, intended for heavy use, the mechanism he describes seems to open the door to ASP.NET for Apache/Win. Whether or not PHP has really surpassed ASP as the #1 server-side script language, as this unconfirmed report suggests, the untethering of ASP.NET from IIS opens up interesting new vistas.


Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2002/06/21.html#a314