ASP.NET - Building your own routing system

Question

In a recent project, I built my own MVC framework in PHP. One of the things I implemented was a routing system. I used Apache's mod_rewrite to send all requests to index.php, and then parsed the URI to extract information and route the request.

I'm dabbling in ASP.NET now, and I'm wondering if/how I might perform something similar. Is there a way to route all requests (similar to the way WordPress does it) to one page where central route processing is performed? I'm aware of the MVC framework for ASP.NET, but I'd like to take a stab at this myself as I'm tinkering around and learning.

EDIT: BTW, my hosting provider runs IIS 6

Answer 1

"URL Rewriting in ASP.NET" article must work for you:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx

Answer 2

This is going to be a long answer, because I want to make sure you are fully aware of all the ways you can accomplish what you want to do.

The routing engine that powers the ASP.NET MVC Framework will work with the traditional ASP.NET Framework. You can take advantage of using the RouteTable and assigning routes, just like you would in an ASP.NET MVC application. You just don't get the MVC portion in traditional ASP.NET sites. That was a huge enhancement for the ASP.NET Framework and it was great to see them reuse that code and make it work in both frameworks. If you want to learn more about this, check out ScottGu's post and scroll down to URL Routing Improvements. Also here is a reference on how to use the System.Web.Routing in WebForms by Phil Haack.

Now, if you still want to write you own. You will need to learn the ASP.NET HTTP pipeline and how to implement the IHttpModule and the IHttpHandler interfaces to create your own HttpModule or HttpHandler class to handle your routing. These interfaces are the key in writing your own routing engine. To help put those interfaces in a working example, I couldn't recommend this MSDN article enough. It shows you how to with either interface and explains the differences when creating your own routing/url rewriting engine.

Now, if you find out that this might be to much for you. There are third party libraries you can use of people who already wrote a routing/url rewriting engine in .NET. Here is a question that I saw not to long ago asking "What Url rewriter do you use for ASP.Net?" right here on SO.

Answer 3

Dale, thanks for the answer, but your MDSN article link appears to be broken.

Answer 4

Fixed the broken link.