This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by James Avery. Original Post: ASP.NET 2.0 Url Rewriting crippled to the point of uselessness Feed Title: .Avery Blog Feed URL: /blog/Install/BlogNotConfiguredError.aspx Feed Description: .NET and everything nice Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by James Avery Latest Posts From .Avery Blog

I am getting read to implement some url rewriting in my ASP.NET 2.0 project and at first I was excited that it was actually baked right into the framework in 2.0. Then I found out that the implementation was completely crippled and useless for 95% of real-world cases.

Here is an example UrlMappings config section for 2.0, notice what is missing?

 <urlMappings enabled="true">
      <add
          url="~/TodaysNews.aspx"
          mappedUrl="~/news.aspx?category=todays" />
      <add
          url="~/TechNews.aspx"
          mappedUrl="~/news.aspx?category=tech" />
</urlMappings>

Thats nice and all, but what happens when you have a dynamic ID like an order number… say you wanted this url: orders.aspx?ID=12 to map to something like Orders/12.asps. As far as I can tell it’s not possible. I can’t think of very many people would want to hard code all their URL mappings, it doesn’t even seem to make sense for simple scenarios like this.

Back to my favorite 1.1 solution I guess.