FastCGI support for Mono's ASP.NET

Brian Nickel worked on extending our hosting server for ASP.NET applications (XSP) to support FastCGI. Robert Jordan today integrated his Summer of Code project into the main distribution for XSP.

Until today developers had two options to host ASP.NET applications with Mono: mod_mono (using Apache) or using a standalone, minimalistic HTTP 1.0 server (the xsp command).

XSP provides the Mono.WebServer.dll ASP.NET application hosting library (controls application domains, starts up new instances of HttpApplication, configures and most importantly implements the communication endpoint for HttpWorkerRequest). Mono.WebServer.dll is not very useful on its own as it does not actually implement the HTTP protocol.

For Mono.WebServer.dll to actually be useful, it is necessary to write an HTTP front end for it. Something that speaks the protocol and passes on the request to the application hosting interface.

Most setups today look like this:

You just have to imagine the "Internet" on the left side (TODO: get a cloud picture, and copy-paste it).

Some courageous people use our test server (xsp) which merely implements HTTP 1.0 and has no configuration options (other than the port to listen to):

Courageous because really, there is not much other than serving files and requests in that server and it is limited to HTTP 1.0.

With Brian's setup, we now add this to the family:

From the FastCGI and Mono Documentation:

The FastCGI Mono Server was developed as part of the 2007 Google Summer of Code with the goal of increasing the availablity of ASP.NET and simplifying configuration. Requiring as little as zero command line options and supporting a large number of servers, the FastCGI Mono Server makes it simple to include ASP.NET on your server.

Documentation on how to configure the FastCGI support for various servers is available here (In particular lighttpd).

This code is available now from our SVN Repository. This should be available on Mono 1.2.6.

Thanks to Brian for writing this nice code and Robert for integrating this into trunk and Marek for his ongoing maintenance of the ASP.NET stack.

Now, who does one have to bribe to get early access to the ASP.NET MVC bits around here or get invited to the ASP.NET SDRs ;-)