Routing and Rewriting

ASP.NET 3.5 includes a URL routing engine and IIS 7.0 can use a URL re-writing engine (x86) (x64). Routing and rewriting sound very similar, but so do robbing and rewarding – you can’t judge features using phonetics.

Ruslan Yakushev wrote a great article on this very topic last year: “IIS URL Rewriting and ASP.NET routing”. Ruslan outlines the conceptual differences between the two URL hacking approaches as:

1. URL rewriting is used to manipulate URL paths before the request is handled by the Web server. The URL-rewriting module does not know anything about what handler will eventually process the rewritten URL. In addition, the actual request handler might not know that the URL has been rewritten.
2. ASP.NET routing is used to dispatch a request to a handler based on the requested URL path. As opposed to URL rewriting, the routing component knows about handlers and selects the handler that should generate a response for the requested URL. You can think of ASP.NET routing as an advanced handler-mapping mechanism.

Read the full article and I’ll think you’ll find that routing and rewriting turn out to be complementary pieces. For example, you might use rewriting for request blocking and enforcement of canonical URLs, while at the same time using ASP.NET routing for friendly URLs in your application. One advantage of using the ASP.NET routing engine in that scenario is that you can use all the routing rules to not only route requests, but also generate URLs when you put links on a page. The rewriting rules are opaque to an application.