Microsoft gets serious about HTTP

At the recent Professional Developers Conference, Microsoft announced that they would be bringing a new HTTP stack into the .Net framework. It is built on top of WCF but treats HTTP as a first class distributed application protocol. One reason this stack is important is because it will bridge the gap between web sites built on ASP.NET and HTTP based web services built on WCF. It also introduces a new HTTP client stack that shares many components with the server stack to deliver a symmetric experience. It is also backward compatible with the existing WCF REST libraries.

This talk will cover the processor pipeline, the lightweight HTTP channel stack, configuration by convention and the extensibility points. I will demonstrate how to build RESTful services using the default conventions and what options are available for replacing those conventions.