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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T04:03:22+00:00

I am doing some work with Web.Routing, using it to have friendly urls and

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I am doing some work with Web.Routing, using it to have friendly urls and nice Rest like interfaces to a site that is essentially rendered by a single IHttpHandler. There are no webforms, the handler generates all the html/json and writes it as part of process request.

This works well for things like /Sites/Accounting for example, but I can’t get it to work for the site root, i.e. ‘/’.

I have tried registering a route with an empty string, with ‘default.aspx’ (which is the empty aspx file I keep in my root folder to play nice with cassini and iis). I set RouteExistingFiles to false explicitly, but whatever I do when hitting the root url it still opens default.axpx, which has no code it inherits from, and contains a simple h1 tag to show that I’ve hit it.

I don’t want to change the default file to redirect to a desired route, I just want the equivalent of a ‘default’ route that is applied when no other routes are found, similar to MVC.

For reference, the previous version of the site didn’t use Web.Routing, but had a handler referenced in the web.config that was perfectly capable of intercepting requests for the root or default.aspx.

Specs: ASP.NET 3.5sp1, C#, no webforms, MVC or openrasta. Plain old IHttpHandlers.

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  1. Editorial Team

    Fixed my own problem: the issue is the integrated web server, Cassini or some such. Seems that it doesnt play nice with routing, and will by default simply return the default.aspx file or, if it is missing, show a directory listing.

    Using IIS with a virtual directory works fine, but is annoying (frustrates code sharers because they need to set up new virtual directories when they open my app, and pollutes my own IIS instance. Bah. Probably what I’ll do for the moment however, or setup a new application manually so I can use the domain host only path like what will exist in live.

    An alternative is to use the updated version of cassini, seen here, which works if the default.aspx file is missing, but I have not worked out how to integrate it with visual studio yet. Any help would be appreciated, but its not a big priority given I have workarounds.

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