Manually processing HTTP POST data ...

Coming from PHP this task would be quite easy for me: Just enable always_populate_raw_post_data in the php.ini file (or per host in the server's configuration) and then access the data using the $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA variable. Since .Net has a stricter architecture you need some API to access it. I knew hat there's the request object holding most information about the current request and I looked at it's members and found a way to access the data. For a test I created an ASX web page and create the following test code:

public partial class foo : System.Web.UI.Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        XmlDocument dom = new XmlDocument();
        dom.Load(this.Request.InputStream);
    }
}

For my first test this worked fine, while I've got an exception from dom.Load() since I didn't send an XML file. When sending the real document I got another Exception telling me "A potentially dangerous Request. Form value was detected from the client" That's a message created from the XSS protection integrated to ASP.NET 1.1 . To disable it one must either change the .aspx file and add an disable validation in the page tag

or by changing the Web.config configuration file accordingly.