Tim Mackey's Weblog

I was doing an upgrade on a web site recently, and all the pages were .html pages.  I wanted to add some .Net functionality, but didn't want to change all the urls, for bookmarks, search engines etc.  As well as scaring off the client with the strange ".aspx" file extensions.  yes- many irish companies are still technophobic. 

Add an IIS mapping for .html

i remember how to change mappings for a file extension in IIS (web site properties > home directory > configuration), so i did this for .html pages by adding a mapping for .html to aspnet_isapi.dll (copy the full path from the mapping for .aspx). 

Add a HttpHandler to the application web.config file

when i did the above, my .net code was ignored and rendered as plain text.  i found out this was because the web application (at the .net level) wasn't configured to handle .html files as .aspx files. this is what i added to my web.config to get it working:

now the whole application works with full .net functionality, overcoming all those migration problems usually associated with .net upgrades.