webforms - ASP.NET Routing - Do Custom Routes COMPLETELY SKIP Everything in the Global.asax?

Question

I have a simple ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Web Forms app... I've added the System.Web.Routing DLL, and I've made a simple route that returns a standard ASP.NET Page as the "IHttpHandler".

All is good... except that HttpContext.Current.User is null ???

So, I did a little more digging (I put breakpoints in all the events in the Global.asax file). Normally, these breakpoints get hit (when I navigate to a standard ".aspx" page):

• Application_BeginRequest
• Application_AuthenticateRequest
• Application_EndRequest

But, when using ASP.NET Routing... none of those events are firing. Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Assuming you're using IIS6, the alternative is to define a "wild card" extension handler. Adding this simple "catch all" mapping to IIS6 will enable it to process your extensionless requests. By default, the .NET installer maps ".aspx" to the aspnet_isapi.dll- that's why the .aspx extension works. To map requests with no extension to the APS.NET engine, you must tell IIS to look at every request.

Here's a quick article that explains the process:

http://haacked.com/archive/2008/11/26/asp.net-mvc-on-iis-6-walkthrough.aspx

Hope that helps and reduces the "lame" factor of your URLs. :)

-Todd