10-4 Episode 11: Bi-Directional Routing with ASP.NET WebForms 4.0

That is one of the first questions that always comes up after seeing ASP.NET Routing As of right now the only way to configure your routes is through code. That said, I'm a firm believer that a good API is the perfect foundation for layering additional forms of expression (i.e. loading routes from a config file or DB). There are a couple prototypes floating around that pull your route definitions from config that I'd be more than happy to share with you.

As far as new rendering of controls, I'll deifnitely try to fit this in later episodes. Funny enough I actually showed off a very subtle change to the ListView control in this episode but I didn't call it out. You no longer have to have a PlaceHolderTemplate if your ItemTemplate's contents are truly seperate markup (i.e. not <li>'s within a <ul> for instance).

Feel free to email me (joncart at microsoft dot com) and I can share some additional info in the meantine.

I would go with the unique string approach. Since part of the whole objective is to provide more meaningful URLs to end users, integer/guid identifiers don't really provide them any value. That doesn't mean that you won't still need to do something along the lines of "Products/1" in situations were that makes sense. You might have resources that don't legitimately have a unique value other than an ID. For SEO purposes having a descriptive value in the URL certainly helps as well. "Products/Cups" is capable of being spidered as a resource on "cups" whereas "Products/45" isn't. Will that make a huge difference? Maybe not, but every little bit helps

There is no need to get religious on either approach, it all just comes down to which approach serves the needs of your application the best. Since routing is so extensible, you should have fun building the sitemap you want. There is soooo much more to it then what I showed in this demo since this episode was meant only to show how routing and webforms can work together. General purpose routing has plenty of awesome little features.

I doubt there will be a 10-4 episode on ASP.NET Routing specifically since it isn't a feature in .NET Framework 4.0, but I could throw together some ad-hoc screencasts and plop them on my blog (http://www.lostintangent.com) or C9.

Keep these great questions coming guys, I seriously love the 10-4 community