September 2008 - RuslanY Blog

Wildcard script mapping and IIS 7 integrated pipeline

The big benefit of IIS 7 integrated request processing pipeline is the fact that all the nice and useful ASP.NET features can be used for any type of content on your web site; not just for ASP.NET-specific content. For example, ASP.NET SQL-based membership can be used to protect static files and folders. Also, ASP.NET extensibility API’s, such as IHttpHandler and IHttpModule can be used to add custom modules and handlers that would be executed even for non-ASP.NET content.

IIS 6 did not have this level of integration. ASP.NET was plugged into IIS 6 as an ISAPI extension and by default was configured to handle ONLY requests mapped to that extension – for example any request that ended with “.aspx” would be be processed by ASP.NET extension. This obviously was a big limitation for customers who wanted to be able to use ASP.NET features for all other contend on web site. The most common way to workaround that was to use “Wildcard script mapping”. This post explains how an application that used wildcard script mapping in IIS 6 can be migrated over to IIS 7.

Assume you had configured ASP.NET in IIS 6 to handle all requests by using wildcard script mapping. For example you had an ASP.NET module for URL rewriting and you wanted this module to handle extension-less URLs.

Video walkthrough for URL Rewrite Module

Last week I have recorded a video screencast that shows how to use URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 to perform some common URL manipulations tasks. Today this video has been published on IIS.NET – check it out at this location.

The video demonstrates how to create rewrite rules to perform the following tasks:

Enabling user friendly and search engine friendly URLs for dynamic web pages;
Enforcing canonical host names, so that site visitors as well as search engines always use a particular domain name for your web site;
Using rewrite maps to define static mappings between requested and rewritten URLs;
Blocking unwanted site crawlers by aborting requests based on HTTP user-agent header.

In addition, the video shows how to test, troubleshoot and debug rewrite rules by using “Test pattern” tool and IIS 7.0 Failed Request Tracing.

Please take a look and leave comments or questions if anything is not clear or you would like to get more information on a particular topic.

URL Rewrite Module – Go Live release

Today IIS team has made the Go Live release of URL Rewrite Module for IIS 7.0 available for download. This release contains significant functionality and performance improvements and it is believed to have a quality level suitable for production deployments.

Download the Go Live release of the module today!

Note that the installer for URL Rewrite Module includes the FastCGI update for IIS 7.0. If this update has not been yet installed on your machine it will be installed together with URL Rewrite Module.

ASP.NET Routing, Request Filtering, URL Rewriting

Today I have published two new articles on http://learn.iis.net. The articles are intended to explain the differences between various URL manipulation technologies available in IIS 7.0 and to provide help with choosing of the technology best suited for a particular usage scenario.

Here is the short summary of the articles:

IIS 7.0 URL Rewriting and ASP.NET Routing – with the release of URL-rewrite module for IIS 7.0 and the inclusion of ASP.NET routing into the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, there have been a lot of questions from ASP.NET developers about how these two features relate to each other and when to use each. This article describes the differences between these two technologies and provides guidance for Web developers on when to use IIS URL rewriting and when to use ASP.NET routing.
IIS 7.0 Request Filtering and URL Rewriting – IIS 7.0 includes a request filtering module that is based on the URLScan ISAPI Filter for IIS 6.0. The module helps you tighten security of your Web servers. The URL rewrite module, even though its primary purpose is to rewrite URL paths for requests, can also be used as a security enforcement tool that helps prevent access to Web site content. The article compares security related features of these two modules and explains how to choose among them when securing your web server.

Please take a look and leave comments or questions if anything is not clear or you would like to get more information on a particular topic.

Acknowledgements: I want to thank Phil Haack from ASP.NET team and Nazim Lala from IIS team for reviewing the articles and providing great feedback. Also I thank Mike Pope for very high quality editing of the articles.