Configure your ASP.NET application that uses routing in IIS-6

Configure your ASP.NET application that uses routing in IIS-6

Recently I’ve come across the need to have my own routing handlers in ASP.NET application.

After coding our routing handler in our ASP.NET application (available in .NET 3.5 and in much easier way in .NET 4)

Since IIS-6 doesn’t use .Net as a natural part of it’s pipeline there is a
need to do some configuration.

1. Go to your IIS-6 management console, choose your ASP.NET application,
and click properties.

2. Go to Home directory / Virtual directory tab.

3. On the button near the application name, click configure, as shown below

4. On mapping tab, go to one of the mappers and copy the executable path.
    This path is the ISAPI executable who handles all ASP.NET requests. We
   will need it to handle all non-ASP.NET requests also.

5. Click Insert on the buttons below. That is for having ASP.NET handling all
   requests.

6. On the new dialog that will open, paste the executable you’ve already copied, 
    and uncheck the “Verify file exists”. Leaving this checkbox checked will
    cause IIS to search for the actual file and it won’t use your routing.

7. Press OK’s until you exit the application configuration.

So, What have we actually done here:
after coding our routing handler in our application, we need to make IIS-6 work
with it. Therefor we need to route all HTTP requests to ASP.NET on our application.  
So, basically, that all what we did.
We’ve set a wildcard application map to route all requests to ASP.NET, and
removed the requirement to check whether the actual file exist so our routing handler
can really route.