There are primarily seven stages in the ASP.Net Request Life Cycle :

1. Routing
Asp.net Routing is the first step in MVC request cycle. Basically it is a pattern matching system that matches the request’s URL against the registered URL patterns in the Route Table. When a matching pattern found in the Route Table, the Routing engine forwards the request to the corresponding IRouteHandler for that request. The default one calls theMvcHandler. The routing engine returns a 404 HTTP status code against that request if the patterns is not found in the Route Table. When application starts at first time, it registers one or more patterns to the Route Table to tell the routing system what to do with any requests that match these patterns. An application has only one Route Table and this is setup in the Global.asax file of the application.

2. MVCRouteHandler
MVC handler is responsible for initiating MVC applications. The MvcRouteHandler object creates an instance of the MvcHandler and passes the instance of RequestContext to MvcHandler. MvcHandler is implemented from ITttpHandler and it cannot map as a handler. This class does not support a parameterless constructor. It takes RequestContext as a parameter.

3. Action Execution
Once the controller has been instantiated, Controller's ActionInvoker determines which specific action to invoke on the controller. Action to be execute is chosen based on attributes ActionNameSelectorAttribute (by default method which have the same name as the action is chosen) and ActionMethodSelectorAttribute(If more than one method found, the correct one is chosen with the help of this attribute).

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4. Controller
MVCHandler receives a controller instance from the MVC controller factory (IControllerFactory). This controller handles further processing of the request. The MVCHandler object uses RequestContext (passed as a constructor parameter) instance to identify the IControllerFactory object to create the controller instance. The MvcHandler instance calls the Execute method of controller.

5. View Engine
View Result is responsible for selecting and involving the appropriate View Engine. A View Engine is responsible for rendering HTML to the browser. The View Engine template has different syntax to implement the view. Currently there are four builtin View Engines (Razor, ASPX, Spark and NHaml) supported by MVC. We can also create our own custom View Engine to render a view. All the View Engines may not be supported in all versions of MVC. We can also use multiple View Engines simultaneously in ASP.NET MVC.

6. View Result
The action method receives user input, prepares the appropriate response data, and then executes the result by returning a result type. The result type can be ViewResult, RedirectToRouteResult, RedirectResult, ContentResult, JsonResult, FileResult, and EmptyResult.