Can an assembly in an ASP.NET Bin folder automatically register HTTP handlers?

Question

Is it possible for a .NET assembly in an ASP.NET web site's Bin folder to automatically respond to certain incoming HTTP requests, as if it had an httpHandlers entry in the web site's web.config file, but without actually having to add that entry?

For example an assembly may contain the following metadata to get some embedded static resource to be available in an ordinary HTTP request:

[assembly: System.Web.UI.WebResource("SomeManifestResource", "image/gif")]

I'm looking for similar functionality that instead of returning a static resource will actually invoke an HttpHandler that is defined the assembly. Again, without actually having to add the entry to the web.config file.

Answer 1

No that is simply not possible.

Everything in ASP.NET that responds back with HTML output is HttpHandler somewhere in the inheritance hierarchy. So HttpHandlers are really one of the most critical part of ASP.NET runtime. Even your asp.net pages [aspx,ascx] do implement IhttpHandler to be able to serve HTML content.

You must configure them in your web.config to have them work for you.