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ASP.Net on Windows CE

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Summary: I've been asked this a number of times in the last few weeks, so I'll say for the record Windows CE does not currently have ASP.Net support nor is it on our plan of record.  We have a very good subset of ISAPI extensions, ISAPI Filters, and ASP Pages but we don't have a managed web server story.

Want to do it yourself?

Suppose you want to write your own ASP.Net for CE?  There's nothing stopping you though it would be tricky.  Some German college students asked me how to do this a few weeks ago, for the very curious here's my slightly polished response. 

The hardest part here is that you can't call managed code from within any native process.  So you can't write an ISAPI extension that just calls C# objects, since the ISAPI & Web Server are both running from within services.exe.

This means your options are:
1) Write a web server from scratch using C# that is ASP.Net smart.  I don't really recommend this unless you happen to have a C# web server to start out with.  The CE Web Server does bunches of stuff for you like HTTP parsing, user validation, SSL, etc etc etc which even if you started with C# would be a fair amount of work to re-invent.

2) Write an ISAPI extension that proxies HTTP requests on to another process written in C#.  The C# will then look at the HTTP headers, POST data, etc... and be the ASP.Net implementor and will return whatever data it wants to back to the ISAPI extension which in turn returns it to the client. 

You don't have to proxy the request in raw form exactly as it was received on the wire.  You can put it in some easy to use data structure that has the key fields already parsed out and then ship that across process.  If I were to implement this, I would go with this option. 

I was able to get the key portions of standard ASP in about 5000 lines of code (without going into the details ASP on the desktop is a bit bigger than this :), though in fairness it does a lot more too).  So if you carefully subsetted out the ASP.Net required for the scenario you could probably get a pretty good bang for the buck once you got the interprocess communication stuff down.

[Author: John Spaith]

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 04, 2006
    Software / Hardware SOTI Pocket Controller Professional v5.07 is out Pocket PC Thoughts is reporting
  • Anonymous
    September 04, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    September 06, 2006
    Andreas - having done some ASP.net work myself for a night school class, i appreciate how nice it is to program in.  As far as us not having it on WinCE, it really gets down to basically number of customers asking for it versus number of people asking for other stuff (like for instance removing the 32MB VM limitation per process, which was a huge work item for the networking team).

    ASP.net is on our radar, but as I said we're not doing any work on it presently.  I'm sorry we don't have anything better to help out in the time being.

    John
  • Anonymous
    March 06, 2008
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    March 10, 2008
    First, you could check out http://www.opennetcf.com/padarn.ocf -- it's commercial though.If you want to go with your own --I write in general about IPC on CE at http://blogs.msdn.com/cenet/archive/2005/07/13/438424.aspx.Unfortunately I don't know managed as well, you may try a managed group.  For this particular scenario, you may actually try writing a service that runs in services.exe.  Then your C# application will call CreateFile("") on your service and can do a DeviceIoControl (I think you'll have to P/Invoke into that).  Your DeviceIoControl() will pass your service an empty buffer for it to write whatever data it wants back into it.When an HTTP request comes in, then your ISAPI extension notifies your service to wakeup a listening DeviceIoControl caller, which isn't hard since they're in the same process.  Your ISAPI & service can be the same DLL in fact to make things even easier.  When your C# has a response to send, it calls DeviceIoControl() with a different IOCTL code that indicates it wants the ISAPI extension to send a response - the ISPAI was blocked waiting for the C# app to respond in interim.This mechanism of service w/ISAPI extension is effectively how UPnP works, it has same issue where we want stuff in a diferent process playing well with it.I have a white paper on services.exe for CE4-5 (mostly true for CE6 too, but some specifics have changed) at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa446909.aspx that walks through writing a service that handles DeviceIoControl's.John
  • Anonymous
    June 15, 2009
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