Developing an open source project is a very rewarding experience. But sadly (as an open source developer that is) open source projects rarely get the feedback they deserve. Often the developers only hear feedback from their users when their software is broken, because of this it is often difficult to know when an author’s work is truly appreciated. read more

As I mentioned in my last post, aspNETserve 1.3 has just been released. And with it comes some exciting changes. Here is an outline of some of the most notable changes:

HTTP Persistent Connections

aspNETserve’s goal is to target version 1.1 of the HTTP protocol, and prior to version 1.3 of aspNETserve it had an obvious shortcoming in that goal. It did not even attempt to keep “Keep-Alive” (aka, persistent) connections around. The server naively closed the connection after each request.

The new aspNETserve.Server object in version 1.3 has full support for persistent connections, and with it introduces a couple of new properties:

MaxConnections

This property represents the maximum number of simultaneous connections allowed. Once the maximum amount has been reached additional requests will be declined.

KeepAliveRequestTimeout

A period of time (in milliseconds) that aspNETserve will wait for subsequent communications on a previously established connection.

Windows Service Server

A Windows service called aspNETserve.Ice (pun intended) allows aspNETserve to process requests in the background. Additionally, this allows request processing without a user having to first login and launch the SimpleServer UI.

aspNETserve.Ice reads it configuration from an XML file whose schema is define on the wiki page ConfigSchemaOverview.

Here is a simple example of what the XML file looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<server xmlns="http://aspnetserve.googlecode.com/svn/tags/Release%201.3/aspNETserve/Configuration/Xml/aspNETserve.config.xsd">
        <application physicalPath="c:\temp">
                <domain name="www.example.com" virtualPath="/" />
                <endpoint ip="127.0.0.1" port="80" />
                <endpoint ip="127.0.0.1" port="443" secure="true" />
        </application>
</server>
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It has been a while since I have mentioned anything about aspNETserve, so I figured it was due time for an update. Since the last update in December of 2007 there wasn’t any activity until recently. Between being distracted with a plethora of personal and professional obligations the project took a back seat. read more

To correspond with the release of aspNETserve version 1.1, I have written a simple demonstration of hosting an ASP.NET 2.0 web server right into your own application.

The following code sample is about as simple as it gets.

using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; using aspNETserve; namespace ConsoleWebServer { class Program { static void Main(string[] args) { string physicalPath = "c:\\wwwroot"; int port = 8080; using (Server s = new Server(new System.Net.IPAddress(new byte[] { 127, 0, 0, 1 }), "/", physicalPath, port)) { s.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Press any key to stop the server"); Console.ReadKey(); s.Stop(); } } } } read more