If you’re using IIS and ASP.Net…I fart in your general direction. I discussed this URL-rewriting feature (Using a single file to handle all requests) on one of our portals with our lead .Net developer, and his response was a gruff, “well, if Apache can do it, I can do it…” A week later, I am asked which config file I want to store my URL entries in.

Sigh…

The whole point of URL rewriting is so that you don’t have to do stupid crap like “update another file that contains information about the file you just added/deleted.” Then a few days later he tells me that it can happen, but the URLs must be in the format /info/page-name.aspx. Not that I mind too much, as it’s basically what I asked for, but it doesn’t seem that hard. I mean, I’m not an expert ASP.Net developer. I don’t even like
ASP.Net. This is now another reason added to the many reasons I don’t like it.

A few days ago, I heard about ASP.Net MVC (via Scott Gu’s blog, no link love for Microsoft, because their description doesn’t say anything meaningful).

It includes a very powerful URL mapping component that enables you to build applications with clean URLs.

Clean URLs. Like the one at the top of this page. Like the ones you see on CodeIgniter, WordPress, ExpressionEngine, and most other PHP/Apache sites out there. My guess is I’ll get one more week, maybe two before we’re rewriting with ASP.Net MVC.