Home/ Questions/Q 3343118
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-18T00:55:04+00:00

I was under the impression that static files (CSS, images, @font-face files, etc) bypassed

  • 0

I was under the impression that static files (CSS, images, @font-face files, etc) bypassed ASP.NET completely, and were served directly by IIS.

However, my BeginRequest event handler is being called for every HTTP request, including those for static files. This concerns me because I’m creating an Entity Framework data context to be used for the lifetime of each request in that event handler. I don’t want to create those contexts if they’re never going to be used.

I’m using IIS 7 on Windows 7 Ultimate with no special handler mappings defined. Do I have it wrong? Should these events be firing?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I believe a default ASP.NET MVC site has this set in the web.config.

    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />

    This means every .NET module will be loaded for every IIS request. This is required for ASP.NET MVC to handle extension-less routing. It’s essentially a wildcard mapping that you would write in IIS that would match everything and route it to ASP.NET that lives in the web.config.

    Read more here, including a way to disable the behavior if you aren’t using .NET 4.0. It is nasty, but it’s the cleanest solution for sites that can’t deal with the overhead of having static files served by asp.net.

    • 0