This article provides a well written explanation of the path from browser request to ASP.NET processing. How this guy manages to get any work done living in Hawaii I have no idea.
ASP.NET is a powerful platform for building Web applications, that provides a tremendous amount of flexibility and power for building just about any kind of Web application. Most people are familiar only with the high level frameworks like WebForms and WebServices which sit at the very top level of the ASP.NET hierarchy. In this article I’ll describe the lower level aspects of ASP.NET and explain how requests move from Web Server to the ASP.NET runtime and then through the ASP.NET Http Pipeline to process requests.