Question

I’m a C#, ASP.NET newbie.

Let’s say I have an existing C# project (from a “Console Application” template; I work with Visual Studio). I want to be able to start a simple HTTP server and serve .aspx pages (or ordinary text even, in which case I’m also looking for a nice templating library ^^), but only if a certain command is given to the program via the command-line interface. (So, the server is not up by default.)

How could I best accomplish this?

Thank you very much for any help!

Edit: To clarify, I’d like all of this functionality to be embedded in a single non-webapp non-website project. That is, the project is made up of three parts: the command-line interface, the optionally-run web interface (the HTTP server), and the core that waits for and reacts to requests by either of those two interfaces. This is the current state of the existing project, sans the web-interface.

Answer 1

You could host the ASP.NET runtime inside a console application. Here’s an example:

public class SimpleHost : MarshalByRefObject
{
    public void ProcessRequest(string page, string query, TextWriter writer)
    {
        SimpleWorkerRequest swr = new SimpleWorkerRequest(page, query, writer);
        HttpRuntime.ProcessRequest(swr);
    }
}

class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // TODO: Check to see if a given argument has been passed on the command-line

        SimpleHost host = (SimpleHost)ApplicationHost.CreateApplicationHost(
            typeof(SimpleHost), "/", Directory.GetCurrentDirectory());

        HttpListener listener = new HttpListener();
        listener.Prefixes.Add("http://localhost:9999/");
        listener.Start();
        Console.WriteLine("Listening for requests on http://localhost:9999/");

        while (true)
        {
            HttpListenerContext context = listener.GetContext();
            string page = context.Request.Url.LocalPath.Replace("/", "");
            string query = context.Request.Url.Query.Replace("?", "");
            using (var writer = new StreamWriter(context.Response.OutputStream))
            {
                host.ProcessRequest(page, query, writer);
            }
            context.Response.Close();
        }

    }
}

You might get a TypeLoadException when you run this program. You have to create a bin subdirectory to your current directory and move a copy of the executable to it. This is because the ASP.NET runtime will look for a bin subdirectory. Another option is to put SimpleHost into a separate assembly which you deploy into the GAC.