Month: October 2008

Major revision of FastCGI/PHP article on IIS.NET

Since the time we have published the article about installing FastCGI and PHP on IIS 7.0 it has become one of the most popular articles on http://learn.iis.net. Also it has received a lot of comments from site visitors. Today, we are publishing the updated version of this article that contains more up-to-date information and addresses most of the feedback from community. Here is what this article includes now:

Please take a look at the new content and leave comments if you have any questions of feedback.

Acknowledgments: I would like to thank IIS.NET visitors who have provided their comments and corrections to this article. Also I thank Jake and Bill for doing a final review of the article.

ASP.NET postbacks and URL rewriting

ASP.NET Web Forms extensively use postback mechanism in order to maintain the state of the server-side controls on the web page. This makes it somewhat tricky to perform URL rewriting for ASP.NET pages. When a server side form control is added to the web page, ASP.NET will render the response with HTML <form> tag that contains an action attribute pointing back to the page where the form control is. This means that if URL rewriting was used for that page, the action attribute will point back to the rewritten URL, not to the URL that was requested from the browser. This will cause the browser to show rewritten URL any time a postback occurs.

Let me demonstrate this on an example. Assume you have a very simple web form in a file called default.aspx. When you request http://localhost/default.aspx in a browser and then view the HTML source for the response, you will see that the response contains the <form> element, which looks similar to this:

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