Owin.dll and spec statement

[Lee Dale]

Hi,

I am new to OWIN and this group so bear with me on this one.

At the beginning of the spec there is the statement "There is no assembly called OWIN.dll or similar"

However when I create a web project in Visual Studio I see a reference to owin.dll.

I am guessing that owin.dll is an implementation of the OWIN spec from Microsoft but the spec itself doesn't refer to any concrete implementation of itself.

[Ryan Riley]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2014 at 4:40 AM, Lee Dale <lee....@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

Hi, Lee!

 

I am new to OWIN and this group so bear with me on this one.

Welcome!

 

At the beginning of the spec there is the statement "There is no assembly called OWIN.dll or similar"

However when I create a web project in Visual Studio I see a reference to owin.dll.

I am guessing that owin.dll is an implementation of the OWIN spec from Microsoft but the spec itself doesn't refer to any concrete implementation of itself.

Excellent question! One of the original goals was to not require an assembly since we needed to support several, existing frameworks that didn't want additional dependencies.

owin.dll has since been deprecated, and we will no longer be maintaining it. (It will still work just fine for as long as NuGet hosts it.) Originally, it included the early, complex delegate signatures as a helper, but it eventually became the home of `IAppBuilder`, which is a means of providing the extension methods used to wire up middleware in several OWIN implementations. `IAppBuilder` is not part of the OWIN specification, so owin.dll is really a misnomer. It is used by Katana and a few others, but starting with ASP.NET vNext, Microsoft is breaking from that assembly and using their own IApplicationBuilder interface.