Global.asax event handling internals (part 1 of 3)

Some days ago I and another project member were seeing the best way to catch unhandled exceptions in ASP.NET.
We found the Global.Application_Error method in Global.asax which them.
Besides Application_Error, Visual Studio creates some other methods for handling events in Global.asax:
 
protected void Application_Start(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}
protected void Session_Start(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}
protected void Application_BeginRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}
protected void Application_EndRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}
protected void Application_AuthenticateRequest(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}
protected void Application_Error(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}
protected void Session_End(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}
protected void Application_End(Object sender, EventArgs e)
{
}
 
All the methods have a signature compatible with the EventHandler delegate but none of the events are declared in Global or HttpAppliaction.
So how are the methods bound to the events?
If you ask it to Doug Purdy (the Remoting’s father e one of the fathers of Indigo), he would probably answer that it is magic as he did when answering a question of mine about Remoting. But I (whom am not the father of Indigo or Remoting and started studying ASP.NET a couple of weeks ago) will answer:
It does the binding during application initialization using a lot of Reflection.
Handed with my debugger (Visual Studio) and .NET Reflector, I found an internal class called HttpApplicationFactory which is who initializes the application.
But before instantiating an object from Global (in fact a class derived from Global created automatically), HttpApplicationFactory enumerates all Global’s methods within the ReflectOnApplicationType method and with ReflectOnMethodInfoIfItLooksLikeEventHandler() inserts every method that has as name that looks like an event handler in a list.
This list will be enumerated by HttpApplicaton. HookupEventHandlersForAppplicationAndModules to find events whose name is “compatible” with the methods found in Global.
When a compatible name is found, Reflection is used again to bind the method to the event.
As a piece of code worth more than “ new Regex(@"((w+)s)*").Matches(milPalavras).Count” words, follow to the next post.
 
PS.: This is due to the fact that MSN Spaces has a limit on the post’s sizes.

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Alfred Myers

I have been interested in computers since I got my hands on a magazine about digital electronics back in 1983 and programming them has been paying the bills since 1991. Having focused on Microsoft-centric technology stacks for the best part of two decades, in recent years I’ve been educating myself on open source technologies such as Linux, networking and the open web platform.