I thought I’d write a little bit about a simple Silverlight file uploader I’ve been playing with. I see a lot of postings out there asking how to do a file uploader that can show upload progress using Silverlight. There are a few issues to overcome like: how to you actually measure progress, and while using the HttpRequest, how do you update the UI from the worker thread? So this project will hopefully answer some of your questions.
Client-Side
I should make a quick mention that this can be done using either WCF or a simple HTTP request. In my opinion, I think using HTTP request provides better performance and comes with less deployment and maintenance hassle; but likewise it leaves a few other loose ends like security and message integrity (if left unhandled). For this example, I’ll mostly only discuss the HTTP request method. My sample code includes a WCF implementation for reference. (Maybe some of you WCF gurus can tell me how that looks). 
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nathan Silverlight file, http handlers, HttpRequest, progress, Silverlight, upload, WCF, WebRequest
While developing in Visual Studio using the ASP.NET Development Server, all your requests are handled by the asp.net handler. So when you’re playing with things like url redirection or custom handlers, it will work fine while you’re developing. But when you deploy it to IIS, you need to add the handler for the extension so IIS knows that ASP.NET is processing the request.
I just ran into this while building an image handler for custom_folder/*.jpg. I wanted all requests for jpg files here to be handled by my custom handler. My IIS Server wasn’t responding properly because it wasn’t configured to pass that request to asp.net. Unfortunately, I’m working with a shared hosting environment and Medium Trust, so I have to change this to something that is handled by asp.net by default like *.ashx, aspx, etc.
In a full trust environment where you have acess to the IIS server, you can add a new ISAPI handler for any extension you want to override in asp.net. Just go to the application configuration for the website or virtual directory and add a new ISAPI filter for your extension. When adding a new extension filter, point it to the same path as the other asp.net ISAPI handlers. If you want it to just handle for a single folder, it might be a good idea to set it up as its own virtual directory with a filter for that virtual directory alone. This will allow asp.net to handle the requests for that file type, then you can use your custom handler as you normally would in the development environment.
If anyone is interested, I can provided more information.
nathan .NET, ASP.Net ASP.Net, http handlers
