Question

Is it at all possible to inject a request into IIS for a page, have IIS and ASP.Net handle it as normal, but get the response as html handed back to me programmatically?

Yes, I know that I could connect to port 80 using WebRequest and WebResponse, but that becomes difficult if you are accessing the IIS server from the same physical machine (loopback security controls et al).

Basically, I want to inject the request (eg for http://example.org/MyPage.aspx) between the points at which IIS would normally talk to the browser, and the point at which it would route it to the correct ASP.Net application, and get a response back from IIS between the points at which ASP.Net/IIS applies the httpfilters and hands the html back to the browser.

I’m predominantly working with IIS7 so if there is a solution that works just for IIS7 then thats not an issue.

Answer 1

You could implement a custom HttpModule, which would give you access to the IIS pipeline, including the final response. However, you would still need to initiate a request to IIS to actually kick off processing. Not sure if this would work for you.

From the MSDN documentation:

An HTTP module is an assembly that is
called on every request that is made
to your application. HTTP modules are
called as part of the request pipeline
and have access to life-cycle events
throughout the request. HTTP modules
therefore let you examine incoming
requests and take action based on the
request. They also let you examine the
outgoing response and modify it.