Quote Originally Posted by dbassettt74 View Post
Okay, I see what you mean regarding the attribute. It is available to the developer by simply referencing my assembly, not necessarily inheriting from. But, if the developer does not inherit, I have no knowledge of the developer's class that he created. So how would I use the SomeOtherClass.GetType().GetMethods()? This assumes I know the name of the SomeOtherClass class.

I'm slowly getting this but still a little fuzzy on the overall setup.

This will be an ASP.NET website, that will not necessarily have any actual ASPX pages, because I think this is what the HttpHandler is for. I can have the handler route the request context to my custom class, right? And in that custom class, based on what the user requested, I will then iterate over the developer's classes, looking for particular decorations, do some processing, and then return result via "response" object.

So say the requested URL (could be POST or GET) is:

http://somesite.com/customprocessor/doSomething

The HttpHandler, will capture this, and route to my custom class, and my custom class will see the path "/doSomething" and handle it appropriately.

Is this possible? Can the ASP.NET "engine" be attached to this, even though the user is not explicitly including a file extension like .ASPX?

Looks like someone else is trying to do the same thing, but never got a response:
http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=379364
Yes, that's possible. Because the HttpHandler is an interceptor of sorts, you could theoretically run an entire website from it based on the incoming requests. Look at the process pipeline here:



Request comes in, modules handle it, then it's on to the handler before the page. So you can consider, just for this discussion, that ASPX is a very specific handler for a specific URL. HttpHandlers are generic handlers that are broader. Because it's before ASPX, you have the option of not calling an ASPX at all.