Thomas Marquardt's Blog

1.0 What is the IIS Pipeline Conceptually, the IIS pipeline is a state machine with the following states: BEGIN_REQUEST AUTHENTICATE_REQUEST AUTHORIZE_REQUEST RESOLVE_REQUEST_CACHE MAP_REQUEST_HANDLER ACQUIRE_REQUEST_STATE PRE_EXECUTE_REQUEST_HANDLER...

This appears to be undocumented. By default, IIS7 uses kernel-mode authentication, which happens to have a large performance benefit. There is a bug in kernel-mode authentication where requests that send credentials will fail unless an anonymous request...