what is machine in asp.net?

Question

I was reading "professional asp.net 4.0 in C# and vb.net" and I saw this satement:

The Application object is not global to the machine; it is global to the HttpApplication .

I don't know, what is machine in this statement?! What does machine mean?!

Answer 1

Machine is the server, that the process hosting the ASP.NET process, is running on.

Usually, but not always this is IIS. But it could be any code that hosts the ASP.NET runtime - like cassini (an open source webserver provided in VS2008+ and now an open source project in it's own right ).

Anyway this means that if you have two hosting processes (using the above critera) then the Application object is not shared by both these processes. There will be a single Application object in each of those processes.

This is one of my favourite articles about the ASP.NET and the HTTP pipeline . It presents lots of background information to how ASP.net hangs togeher, I think you might find useful.