UrlRewriter.NET is an open-source, light-weight, highly configurable URL rewriting component for ASP.NET 1.1 – 4.0. 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.

UrlRewriter.NET is a great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool. Using UrlRewriter.NET, you can create URL’s containing your target keywords, boosting your rankings.

With UrlRewriter.NET, you can:

  • Rewrite URL’s from “user and Search Engine” friendly urls to the actual .aspx pages (also known as URL Masking, IIS Rewrite or ASP Rewrite)
  • Redirect from old URL patterns to the new ones, ensuring the Search Engine spiders continue to follow your links (also known as URL Replace)
  • Block certain visitors based on the User-Agent – very helpful for blocking crawlers that don’t obey the robots.txt protocol
  • Ban users based on IP range (provides the capabilities of mod_rewrite on IIS)
  • And much more…

UrlRewriter.NET is a pure .NET component written in C#, and does not require any ISAPI rewrite dll’s to be installed in IIS. You configure rules in a very readable XML format, either in your web.config file or an external rewriter configuration file.

UrlRewriter.NET is in use in many websites large and small such as DotNetKicks, and is embedded in several open source packages, such as the fantastic Yet Another Forum.NET.