Disclaimer: This is the first time I am asking a question that might be classified as subjective. As English is not my first language, it is hard to phrase this right. So please feel free to edit the question in order to make it clearer, or to point me at other ways for asking this.
Intro: David Ebbo (architect on the ASP.NET team) just posted on Register your HTTP modules at runtime without config using the seemingly undocumented PreApplicationStartMethod assembly level attribute
I have mixed feelings about it.
On the one hand it is good to be able to do things as early in the application startup phase as possible.
On the other hand: Does it suffice? Do we need a PrePreApplicationStartMethod allowing to fiddle with the PreApplicationStartMethod behaviour? What about expansion to non-assembly use (for instance, NuGet already works around the single-use-per-assembly restriction of PreApplicationStartMethod)?
Question: Besides using it for config-less startup, what do you think of the PreApplicationStartMethod attribute?
I think one of the good usages for this is that it allows someone who is writing a 3rd party assembly, or a team that is working on an assembly that will be used in many projects, to be able to use this attribute to initialize stuff w/o requiring the end user/developer to create anything in the global.asax in the application startup events.
There are lots of app specific stuff that people like to/need to configure in global.asax, but if you are creating a DLL, you no longer have to make the user configure your classes in the global.asax, you can just put all your logic in your own init/bootstrap function and rely on asp.net to call your init logic when the app starts.