FileSystemProvider??? If ScottGu says so...
Today I attended a long presentation of Scott Guthrie on ASP.NET 2.0. I was already familiar with most of the content, but Scott is a great presenter, so it was really enjoyable seeing him do all the slick demoing.
One thing was completely new to me: he mentioned a FileSystemProvider, that ASP.NET uses to access the file system. Think of the possibilities! You could write your own provider that returns content from the database whenever ASP.NET tries to read a file from the file-system. So you could have users create themes by selecting and clicking around and when ASP.NET looks for a App_Theme/username folder, you feed it the skin and css files generated from the database!
Many other uses come to mind: think content management, think versioned ASPX files that appear online after a certain date.
But why can't I find any reference on this in Google that does not eventually point back to a blog post by Scott himself? Odd...
UPDATE: after looking it up in my local setup of Whidbey CTP nov.:
indeed, there seems to be a VirtualPathProvider class in the framework. It all plugs into the classes in the System.Web.Hosting namespace. I will investigate the possibilities and post about it soon.