OWIN

[Markus Pope]

In case any of you are interested in OWIN, here's the spec...it's a very short read.  Katana is Microsoft's implementation of OWIN (that's the thing that starts with "K" that James metioned.")

http://owin.org/spec/spec/owin-1.0.0.html

It's essentially a way of inserting application delegates in a web request / response pipeline. You'll see heavy use of it in vNext. You'll see glimpses of it in asp.net mvc5 for authentication and SignalR.  Your application delegate is given a dictionary that has the headers, a request stream, a response stream, and other things.  The spec establishes some rules for lifetime and completion of your application delegates.

Here are some things that I think OWIN might be good for:

- Authentication (obviously)

- Transport protocols (obviously)

- Compression

- Encryption

- Logging and statistics

- Looking for exploits (people using the exploits...)

- Diagnostics

- Protocols like RSS where you might want a global way to authenticate and intercept a post.

- Out of band traffic that might be used by a client...this case might be interesting to explore.