I am wondering how one goes about creating/rerouting my custom developed .ASPX pages on IIS 6.0 pages to something totally custom w/o the .aspx extension, say, .vato? For example, instead of my page saying: Default.aspx?ID=123, I would like users to see: Default.vato?ID=123.
What concept is? Is this doable? Where can I research more on this topic?
Yeah, read this:
Create a new entry for your new extension and map it to the same executable as the .aspx handler.
The common one is to add a wildcard. This allows you to have URLs without extensions at all. IMO, that's much preferred because extensions make little sense on the internet.
In IIS (6.0) click on "Configuration" on your Web Site page and you can add mappings there. It must reference the same ASP.NET ISAPI DLL as for example the ASPX pages.
You can also add * and have all requests route to a HTTP module but that's a little more advanced and useful for the likes of REST.
It's not so much a .net question as it is an IIS question.
Basically, IIS looks at what extension is being requested and responds accordingly.
There is a list of all file extensions and what actions should be taken when these are requested. In terms of .net, these are .aspx, .ascx, asmx, etc. These are basically ISAPI filters.
Depending on your version of IIS. If you open IIS Manager, choose the website in question, go to Properties, then Home Directory, then Configuration, under Mappings you will see all file extensions and the application that will be called to action this request.
Therefore, if you add an entry for .vato, and point it to your version of .net, such as C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll then the .vato file will then be treated the same as a .aspx files.