C# CGI executables - good or bad idea?

Question

I would like to write a C# app to handle my HTTP (including AJAX requests) rather than go the PHP, PERL or ASP route as I just need to return some standard HTML, albeit obviously, as I want CGI, dynamically generated.

UPDATE: I am not proposing to write my own web server but have the exe hosted by a webserver such as IIS or Apache. Also I dont want to learn and use ASP (I know I can do it much faster, development time, myself in C#) and I just want W3C valid html sent back to the client.

Are there any good reasons for not doing this?

I realise each time a HTTP request is made the exe has to be loaded and run - but surely so does Perl, ASP and PHP? Is there a way to have an exe remain running dealing with all HTTP requests for specific page? (though it feels like I am just writing a mini HTTP server then!)

Are there any good tutorials? I have read this one, but it is bit dated (2005): http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/cgi_csharp.aspx

UPDATE2: I dont think speed is going to be a issue anyway (running a small exe without a GUI is almost instantaneous) but if I wanted to be really efficant I could write C# server then the non-static page requests can have a tiny exe written in C which sends the request to the C# server and returns the reply. Couldn't I? :)

Answer 1

There are solutions such as FastCGI , that eliminate the overhead of launching an executable every time you want to process a request. Very few people still use traditional CGI. I don't know if there is a solution compatible with .net.

There is a much better option for .NET, the System.Web.IHttpHandler class.

All you have to do is subclass IHttpHandler, and overload 1 method to process a request. In my opinion it is simpler CGI.

There is a good example on the MSDN Site .

Answer 2

如果IIS真的没有为你削减它，我建议利用HttpListener API来做这种事情。