WouterSpaans/HttpListener

Based on article: http://mikehadlow.blogspot.nl/2006/07/playing-with-httpsys.html

I've been having fun playing with HTTP.SYS and the HttpListener (NET 2.0) class
in System.Net. HTTP.SYS is the new kernel mode http listener that replaces
winsock in 2003 Server and XP SP2 and the HttpListener class is a nice managed
interface for the HTTP.SYS API. It's really easy to write your own web server
and do cool things like URL mangling. Basically you just create a new instance
of HttpListener and then tell it to hand you any requests that match the urls
you give it. It's easy to imgaine writing a RESTfull service (see my previous
post on this) using HttpListener. You could just write a windows service to
receive any requests, say 'http://mikehadlow.com/restapp/' and then parse the
local address part of the url to tell you which object to get from your
database. So, say we got the url 'http://mikehadlow.com/restapp/customer/1234',
we'd parse the local address 'restapp/customer/1234', grap 'customer' and
'1234' and go to our database and 'select * from customer where id = 1234',
serialise our customer object as xml and return that xml in the response.
You can also host the ASP.NET pipeline in your own application using
HttpListener. There's a really good MSDN article on this here. This means you
no longer have to worry about having IIS installed on a machine to make your
application response to http requests, any app can do it including windows
forms apps, console apps and windows services. Here's some code for a little
console app, showing how you use HttpListener. It's just a slight re-working
of the example code from the help file. Just start up the app and browse to
'http://localhost:1234/something/else/here?somekey=somevalue&someotherkey=someothervalue'
and you'll see it echo back the local address and the query string parameters.