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by Brad Wilson.
Original Post: ASP.NET without .ASPX files
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I've been doing this for a couple years. It's very addicting: I would never choose ASPX files for any new project that I undertook. The maintenance of an ASPX-based web app with a few hundred pages can be astronomical when you need to change core UI elements that end up on many pages.
As you can imagine, custom controls (user or server controls) can help to mitigate this. Getting rid of ASPX pages is the extreme of this idea: eliminate every piece of the UI from being hand coded in HTML; instead, replace EVERYTHING with custom server controls. It's like a refactoring and componentizing system for your UI.
Like Mike, I used a front controller for dispatching requests. I documented the beginnings of that front controller in an article titled Attribute Based URL Dispatching. The one I've used in production is significantly more powerful than I showed.
We drove our UIs dynamically. Displaying an object meant combining the object with context and action (view vs. edit, for example), and letting a factory give you back the renderer. Composite objects can return composite renderers, which makes the whole system pleasantly recursive. Toss in a WebParts like system for the basic layout of the page, and you end up with a system that's remarkably powerful and flexible with just a little bit of code.
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