What Http Modules are configured in the machine.config .

I am looking into an issue what happens if you forgot to put any session configuration in the web.config file. The session state is one of the http modules configured in the machine.config file, there are a few besides the session state module. The following is what I found in my machine.config file.


<httpModules>
<add name="OutputCache" type="System.Web.Caching.OutputCacheModule" />
<add name="Session" type="System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule" />
<add name="WindowsAuthentication" type="System.Web.Security.WindowsAuthenticationModule" />
<add name="FormsAuthentication" type="System.Web.Security.FormsAuthenticationModule" />
<add name="PassportAuthentication" type="System.Web.Security.PassportAuthenticationModule" />
<add name="RoleManager" type="System.Web.Security.RoleManagerModule" />
<add name="UrlAuthorization" type="System.Web.Security.UrlAuthorizationModule" />
<add name="FileAuthorization" type="System.Web.Security.FileAuthorizationModule" />
<add name="AnonymousIdentification" type="System.Web.Security.AnonymousIdentificationModule" />
<add name="Profile" type="System.Web.Profile.ProfileModule" />
<add name="ErrorHandlerModule" type="System.Web.Mobile.ErrorHandlerModule, System.Web.Mobile, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />
</httpModules>

Basically, when the Http application starts, it will loop through all the http modules which are configured.

And SessionStateModule is one of them, and if you look into what SessionStateModule.Init() actually does. which in turn will call InitModuleFromConfig.



Notice that SessionStateSection config = RuntimeConfig.GetAppConfig().SessionState;

And here is what it does in RuntimeConfig.GetAppConfig().SessionState.

internal SessionStateSection SessionState { get { return (SessionStateSection) this.GetSection("system.web/sessionState", typeof(SessionStateSection)); } }

Here is what it actually tried to read the section from "system.web/sessionState", but what if this section is missing, it will default all its values to default value of SessionStateSeciton. This is just my guessing, I tried to verify it through reflector, but the code is kind of confusing to me. When you cannot step through the code through debugger, you can only step through your code through your head. It becomes a little bit confusing..

Here is what I see the SessionStateSection in the reflector..