ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Introduction to URL Routing

URL routing, in general terms, is a system that enables the developer to build in dynamism, flexibility, and (hopefully) readability to the URLs that access the various parts of a web application.

We’ve all seen URLs like the following:

And we all know how ugly they are. Not only are they difficult to cut and paste, but they’re also not very memorable or not clean, and users never know whether they can feel free to copy them, Digg them, share them on Facebook, or whatever. The reason for this is that, to an end user, a complicated-looking URL is an unusable or unsharable URL. They assume that there’s so much cruft ...