Remotly connecting to an web forms application that uses asp.net routing?

[ianoble]

Oh that's right.

So then the question becomes, is there another way to do .net routing so that I can use IIS5.1 to host my application? At this point I'm thinking the answer is "no", unfortunately.

[Frinavale]

I'm sorry but I've never used .NET rerouting before so I don't know.
What exactly does .NET rerouting do?

Are you interested in URL Rewriting?

-Frinny

[ianoble]

Well .net routing is esentially a simplified version of URL Rewriting. It allows me to go http://localhost/home or http://localhost/home/maintenance or http://localhost/category/product/car

I'm using it so we can have simpler promotional urls that get posted to Facebook/Twitter.

That's the same premise of URL Rewriting, right?

[Frinavale]

Yeah check out that article that I linked you to.
I've never used it myself but the article is very detailed :)

I don't know how far along in the project you are...but another thing that I recommend you check out is ASP.NET MVC (you can download it from here).

It's completely different from the classic ASP.NET that we're all so used to.
This type of project separates your application into 3 components: the Model (your business logic), the View (the front end UI), and the Controller (this routes the request to the right View/Model based on the URL provided).

I really like ASP.NET MVC but I haven't had the chance to implement a real project using it....I've just done things to play with the technology.

It's very powerful. When you split things up like this you can test each component alone...

So if you want to test your business logic then you can do so using Unit Tests without relying on the UI logic. In ASP.NET classic you can't do this because most of the time your logic is directly tied into some ASP.NET control (like a GridView or something) and it's hard to test one without having to deal with the other.

That's another thing that is very different about ASP.NET MVC...there are no "controls". You design your View using "HTML Controls" which are bound to your data source (your business logic).

It's very flexible and gives you full control over how things are rendered and what should be used to display the controls.

So instead of being stuck with a GridView to display your data, you can create a Table and rearrange things so that (for example) you can have multiple rows displaying one record very easily. If you were stuck with a GridView it's messy to display 2 rows for one record.

I doubt you'll jump into MVC but keep it in mind for future projects :)

-Frinny

[ianoble]

This project actually started out as MVC, but I had to change it to traditional web forms because of architecture issues and how we will be retrieving data. I'm currently building another personal site in MVC so I can definitely see the benefits of it. Unfortunately it just doesn't work for this project.

[ianoble]

I just wanted to update the thread with some information that I stumbled into. It appears that I have found a solution...

In IIS, under the virtual directory properties, using the "Configurat ion" screen, I was able to add a mapping of ".*" and use "c:\windows\mic rosoft.net\fram ework\v2.0.5072 7\aspnet_isapi. dll" as the executable. By doing this, I am now able to use http://localhost/Prototype instead of going through Visual Studio.

Doing this has created a small issue with relative paths, but I'm figuring that part out today.

Thanks for your help Frinny!

Ian

[Frinavale]

Wow!
I'm glad you found a solution to your problem :)