What is an HttpHandler in ASP.NET

Question

What is an HttpHandler in ASP.NET? Why and how is it used?

Answer 1

An HttpHandler (or IHttpHandler) is basically anything that is responsible for serving content. An ASP.NET page (aspx) is a type of handler.

You might write your own, for example, to serve images etc from a database rather than from the web-server itself, or to write a simple POX service (rather than SOAP/WCF/etc)