Pro ASP.NET MVC 4, Fourth Edition

CHAPTER 13

URL Routing

Before the introduction of the MVC Framework, ASP.NET assumed that there was a direct relationship between requested URLs and the files on the server hard disk. The job of the server was to receive the request from the browser and deliver the output from the corresponding file, as follows:

This approach works just fine for Web Forms, where each ASPX page is both a file and a self-contained response to a request. It doesn’t make sense for an MVC application, where requests are processed by action methods in controller classes, ...