Last week (23 August) ASP.NET Web API 2 RC (release candidate) was released on Nuget. One of the interesting changes in this version is the emergence of HttpRequestContext – which provides a shortcut, strongly typed access to the information which up to this point hidden inside of Request.Properties dictionary, as well as some additional useful bits and pieces.
Let’s explore what’s under the hood.
One of the useful configuration features of ASP.NET Web API is that it allows you to be explicit about the assemblies into which it will look in order to discover controller types.
This is especially useful if you have assemblies residing outside of the bin folder, or if you are doing self hosting, and the controllers assemblies are not automatically loaded into the current AppDomain.
There are several hooks in the pipeline that you can plug into to achieve this goal. Let’s explore them, discussing the pros and cons of using any of these.
A lot of Web API functionalities are based around message handlers. The real power of them is that they run for every request and provide an easy mechanism of globally addressing some of the application concerns (such as i.e. security). However, there are situations where you’d like to use a handler to apply specific behavior to only a selected portion of an application.
Let’s have a look at how you’d do it with route-specific message handlers
