The other day I blogged about potentially switching to blogengine.net but one of the major issues is ensuring the URL’s I have in dasBlog either continue to work or redirect accordingly. To that end, I started investigating URL rewriters for ASP.NET and found this post of ScottGu’s very helpful. He mentioned two different Open Source rewriters and I opted for UrlRewriter.net which describes itself as:

UrlRewriter.NET is an open-source, light-weight, highly configurable URL rewriting component for ASP.NET 1.1 and 2.0. UrlRewriter.NET provides similar IIS Rewrite capabilities that the Apache web server provides with mod_rewrite and .htaccess. You don’t need to install an ISAPI Rewrite filter to use the component. Best of all, UrlRewriter.NET is free and licensed with a very permissive MIT-style licence.

I found it to be all of the above and the install/configuration to be very straightforward not to mention it has good online help and a support forum.

One caveat that I ran into though was that once installed at the root I started seeing this error in my other ASP.NET applications:

Server Error in '/blog' Application.

---

Configuration Error

Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

Parser Error Message: Could not load file or assembly 'Intelligencia.UrlRewriter' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified. (E:\web\xxxxxxx\htdocs\web.config line 11)

Source Error:

Line 9:    <system.web>
Line 10:     <httpModules>
Line 11:       <add name="UrlRewriter" type="Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.RewriterHttpModule, 
                     Intelligencia.UrlRewriter" />
Line 12:     </httpModules>
Line 13:   </system.web>

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.1433; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.1433

The Fix

To fix this I added the following to the web.config files of my other ASP.NET applications removing the new assembly dependency:

1 <system.web>
2     <httpModules>
3         <remove name="UrlRewriter" />
4     </httpModules>
5 </system.web>

If you’re aware of other options that don’t require changes to every web.config I’d love to hear about them. At any rate, while I haven’t decided to switch blog engines yet I now have the pieces in place to do just that.