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I heard that when a request goes from browser(client) to IIS ,after extension filtering (aspnet_isapi.dll)several named pipe connections are established between the ISAPI DLL and the worker process(w3wp.exe).

What is the name of those pipes ? will those pipe acts as a communication channel like the one we have with WCF?

ASP.netBeginner
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2 Answers2

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You will find here a superb explanation by Rick Strahl of how ASP.NET works, and yes, named pipes are used in IIS5 for communication between the ISAPI DLL in the inetinfo process and the worker process, but in IIS6 this is no longer necessary since the lowest level of the HTTP stack was transferred to the kernel driver HTTP.SYS, which passes the requests directly to the worker process.

Named pipes are objects managed by the operating system kernel, for which there is a specific Win32 API. WCF named pipe bindings are built on top of these, but involve a great deal more layered on top of the raw pipe transport. Even in IIS5 where named pipes are used for ASP.NET, these are not used in anything like the same way that WCF uses them, so there is no reason to think of them as connected or analogous in any way. The types in the System.IO.Pipes namespace are a nearer comparison, being much thinner wrappers over the OS pipe API.

Chris Dickson
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This is just a binary pipe, one of standard ways to communicate between processes in windows (the others are shared memory and com+ iirc). You can have several worker processes, obviously, so i am not sure there's one single name for the pipe. And i highly doubt this is using any kind of .net serialized data - not sure about this.

Artemiy
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