Love it as you Hate it!
I was stumbled for what I just recently learned, at last, the much awaited and “one of the most hotly requested (not to mention a more decent) features for IIS” is now available! and I already using it.lol!
This feature is not new to web community especially in the open guys community (In fact,I also used the mod_rewrite module in my Apache for here in my blog site). In the IIS world, this feature was existed (through ISAPI) before but it was horrible. Web developers are having difficulties doing URL rewriting and other URL manipulations in the previous version of IIS because sometimes they have to customized their program to interact properly with the rewrite. But now there are lot of new features and it was easier to use that is why I tried it in my upcoming site which I still keep secret for now (it’s not yet done.Okay!).
Anyway, Here’s a quick fact about URL rewriting and IIS rewrite module.
URL Rewriting (wiki)
Rewritten URL’s (sometimes known as short or fancy URL’s) are used to provide shorter and more relevant-looking links to web pages. The technique adds a degree of separation between the files used to generate a web page and the URL that is presented to the world.
Example: This URL contains query string parameters that encode blog entry dates
http://www.example.com/Blogs/Posts.php?Year=2006&Month=12&Day=10
but can be altered to give the user a clear idea of what he or she is going to see
http://www.example.com/Blogs/2006/12/10/
In short, Enabling user friendly and search engine friendly URL in/with dynamic web applications.
Here is a short Overview of IIS rewrite module (MS).
URL rewrite module provides a rule-based rewriting mechanism for changing requested URL’s before they get processed by web server. The module can be used to express URL rewriting logic that can use regular expressions or wildcards and can make rewriting decisions based on HTTP headers and server variables. While the primary purpose of the module is to rewrite requested URL’s, it also has functionality to perform redirects, send custom responses or abort requests based on the logic expressed in the rewrite rules.
Whats good about managing MS servers with Linux servers is that with MS “wizardly” you will never spend your time doing your problem with configuring IIS rewriting! (WOW, is that great!) but you will spend much of time securing your Server itself (wahahahahahaha…..)!Joke.