Skip to main content

ASP.NET Web API: HttpContext.Current is null inside Task

A few days ago, a colleague asked my help to solve an issue he had with ASP.NET Web API. His code looked like the following:

The problem was that HttpContext.Current was always null after switching to another task.

When I tried to reproduce the issue by building a similar sample on my computer, it just worked. The only difference between his code and mine was that I created an ASP.NET Web API 4.5 application, where he was still using ASP.NET 4.

So switching to .NET 4.5 solved the problem. But why? It seems that in ASP.NET 4.5, a task friendly synchronization context got introduced. This synchronization context ensures that the originel context is restored after leaving the await block.

So make sure that you either:

  • Set httpRuntime.targetFramework to 4.5, or
  • In your appSettings, set aspnet:UseTaskFriendlySynchronizationContext to true.

Some more information can be found here.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Azure DevOps/ GitHub emoji

I’m really bad at remembering emoji’s. So here is cheat sheet with all emoji’s that can be used in tools that support the github emoji markdown markup: All credits go to rcaviers who created this list.
Read more

Podman– Command execution failed with exit code 125

After updating WSL on one of the developer machines, Podman failed to work. When we took a look through Podman Desktop, we noticed that Podman had stopped running and returned the following error message: Error: Command execution failed with exit code 125 Here are the steps we tried to fix the issue: We started by running podman info to get some extra details on what could be wrong: >podman info OS: windows/amd64 provider: wsl version: 5.3.1 Cannot connect to Podman. Please verify your connection to the Linux system using `podman system connection list`, or try `podman machine init` and `podman machine start` to manage a new Linux VM Error: unable to connect to Podman socket: failed to connect: dial tcp 127.0.0.1:2655: connectex: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it. That makes sense as the podman VM was not running. Let’s check the VM: >podman machine list NAME         ...
Read more

Cleaner switch expressions with pattern matching in C#

Ever find yourself mapping multiple string values to the same result? Being a C# developer for a long time, I sometimes forget that the C# has evolved so I still dare to chain case labels or reach for a dictionary. Of course with pattern matching this is no longer necessary. With pattern matching, you can express things inline, declaratively, and with zero repetition. A small example I was working on a small script that should invoke different actions depending on the environment. As our developers were using different variations for the same environment e.g.  "tst" alongside "test" , "prd" alongside "prod" .  We asked to streamline this a long time ago, but as these things happen, we still see variations in the wild. This brought me to the following code that is a perfect example for pattern matching: The or keyword here is a logical pattern combinator , not a boolean operator. It matches if either of the specified pattern...
Read more