BeginRequest fires for static files in ASP.NET MVC app

Question

I was under the impression that static files (CSS, images, @font-face files, etc) bypassed ASP.NET completely, and were served directly by IIS.

However, my BeginRe

Answer 1

I believe a default ASP.NET MVC site has this set in the web.config.

This means every .NET module will be loaded for every IIS request. This is required for ASP.NET MVC to handle extension-less routing. It's essentially a wildcard mapping that you would write in IIS that would match everything and route it to ASP.NET that lives in the web.config.

Read more here, including a way to disable the behavior if you aren't using .NET 4.0. It is nasty, but it's the cleanest solution for sites that can't deal with the overhead of having static files served by asp.net.