When you’re exploring any new technology, it pays to have a clear mental picture of what’s happening behind the scenes.

So, if you or someone on your team is getting started with ASP.NET MVC or figuring out the best places to inject your own customisations into it, you might want to print out and stick up this MVC Request-Handling Pipeline poster, made free courtesy of Red Gate Software.

It shows and briefly explains the main phases that ASP.NET MVC undergoes when processing every HTTP request, starting with routing, going through the controller factory and action method selection, and ending up with the view factory and view rendering.

The .NET Tools team at Red Gate asked me to produce this poster so they could give it away in promotion of their excellent ANTS Performance Profiler tool for .NET.