Greetings everyone,
     I am working on an app where I deal with the Raw HTTP request, more specifically binary files that are sent via the HTTP Request. My question is a seemingly easy, although, I have read just about every RFC specification relating to this and every other related article I could find to no avail. My question is: What do binary files get encoded to when they are uploaded via HTTP?? I could have sworn that it was a base64 encode, however when I tried to use System.Convert.ToBase64String does not work and System.Convert.FromBase64Strig raises an exception about invalid Base64 characters in the string.

What im trying to do is grab this encoded string, code it back into a binary file and return it to the user, any ideas???

"The one language all programmers understand is profanity."

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Doug Parsons
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I solved this problem. If anyone couldn't tell I was working with a Raw Http Request (Raw in the sense that I pull it straight out of the HTTP Pipe b4 it has a chance to reach aspnet_wp.exe) the reason for this, if you have never noticed is that when you use the HTMLInputFile control to upload files, no matter the type of file you are uploading (jpg, gif, doc, exe) that ENTIRE file will get stored in the aspnet_wp.exe process on your server; normally this wouldnt be a problem but even after you save that file to disk, store it in a database, or whatever you are going to do with it, most of that file stays in memory.

The problem arises when you are uploading lots of files at one time, the worker process will automatically recycle itself after it has consumed 60% of system memory (unless you have adjusted the default setting) and this will cause your app to fail. The work around to this is to buy a third party component that streams the file directly to disk and bypasses loading it into the worker process or write your own.

I opted for the latter of the 2 and my above question was related to that; the answer to my question was that it isn't an encoding type, the characters that I was seeing where the character representation of my byte arrays (duh).


"The one language all programmers understand is profanity."