Installing and Running node.js applications within IIS on Windows - Are you mad?

Wouldn't it be nice if they just called you back when they were ready?

ASP.NET has always been able to do things (see this MSDN article from 2003 on Async Handlers) with IHttpAsyncHandler but it's always been a bit hard and almost no one knows about it. With the Async CTP and the Task libraries built into .NET, you can build a nicer abstraction on top of IHttpAsyncHandler. Ayende has a simple example AbstractAsyncHandler (there's many of these out there, including a few in our own tools, some things in MVC, and some things in SignalR (more on that soon)) that we can use to do similar work. This example could also do other more complex and pertinent things like file IO, db IO or calling a web service. This is a naive example that doesn't map exactly to the node one below, but it makes the point. Plus, it's nice to look at.

Aside: an ASP.NET IHttpHandler doing the exact same thing on this same machine gets 22,500 requests a second, so node and iisnode has some room to improve, which is great.