How to correctly use IHttpModule to handle Application_OnStart event

In one of my previous blog posts (Writing a custom IHttpModule that handles Application_OnStart event) I've been talking about using IHttpModule to also handle application start event which is a non-documented feature. Sure it works, but you may see some strange behaviour of duplicated (or even multiplicated) functionality being executed. You probably won't see this with your applications in development, because your local IIS isn't really heavy duty workhorse, but in production environment you may see this strange behaviour. Investigating it is even a bit more complicated because of the running application serving live traffic. Let me help you. So I will point you in the right direction and more importantly show you a solution that makes things work reliably even on a heavy load IIS.

Custom Asp.net MVC route class with catch-all segment anywhere in the URL

Asp.net MVC routing does a fine job with routes that have a finite number of segments. We define them with route URL pattern string. The default provided by the Asp.net MVC project template being {controller}/{action}/{id}. Most web applications can do everything using only this single route definition and many developers don't even think beyond this standard. But sometimes this single route just isn't enough or it's just not acceptable.

A real world example

Think of a web site you're building that has hierarchically organised categories. Like Amazon. We have books, music, electronics, etc. And every top category has sub categories. And so on and so forth. Using default route definition we would access a particular (sub)category simply by: www.domain.com/categories/index/647 That's fine, but it's definitely not human friendly. If we'd change our route URL definition to {controller}/{action}/{id}/{name} this would already be much friendlier: www.domain.com/categories/index/647/web-development That's something similar (not the same, because we're still using action names here) to what Stackoverflow does with it's questions.

But now think of this super human readable web address: www.domain.com/books/computer-internet/web-development/latest This one would display latest web development books. As we can see it defines categories in hierarchical order similar to breadcrumbs. All in human readable format. Doing this kind of routing isn't supported out of the box (because we have an action at the end), but I think we could do better. Let's try and create a route that supports this.

Generate enum from a database lookup table using T4

This is something rather common. You're building an application that uses database storage in the background. If your database isn't completely trivial and you're not fatally in love with magic values/numbers, then you probably also use lookup tables to gain referential integrity when it comes to certain types, codes and similar data. But to follow the DRY software development principle we want to use these values defined in database on upper layers as well without manually writing any additional code. Because as mentioned magic values are evil regardless of where they're used.