Chapter 11. URLs, Routing, and Areas

Before the introduction of MVC, ASP.NET assumed that there was a direct relationship between requested URLs and the files on the server hard disk. The job of the server was to receive the request from the browser and deliver the output from the corresponding file, as follows:

Request URL

Corresponding File

http://mysite.com/default.aspx

e:\webroot\default.aspx

http://mysite.com/admin/login.aspx

e:\webroot\admin\login.aspx

http://mysite.com/articles/AnnualReview

File not found! Send error 404.

This approach works just fine for Web Forms, where each ASPX page is both a file and a self-contained response to a request. It doesn't make sense for an MVC application, where requests are processed by action methods in controller ...

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