> > You consider using asp.net to be "bypassing all frameworks completely"?? >
Well no, even using a single handler for the whole app still reveals a lot of cogs spinning in the pipeline, a lot more than I expected. But I have general news on this anyway. If you want to create an app which just does request-response with a simple contract, then I reckon it's easier to code it yourself in the ashx file without any need for the clutter and complexity of WebForms or MVC. I was writing a REST service in the last week using MVC Web Api, and after my experiment I just purged most of the code and did it all myself in the ashx code. I didn't need multiple formatters, routers, controllers, filters, integrated security, caching, etc, so all that stuff is gone and my project is smaller and neater. I just parse the URL and query parameters and return XML. I think it's a suitable technique for simple applications, especially REST services. *Greg K*
