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Creating a HTTPHandler in WebMatrix

This weekend I thought I would get round to a project that I’ve been meaning to do for a long time – a new website for the Radio TFS podcast that I do with Mickey and Paul. I haven’t had the chance to play with WebMatrix before so thought that I would give it a try when building the new Radio TFS site. I’m also behind in my learning’s around ASP.NET MVC, WebDeploy and IIS 7 so it’s going to be a good weekend!

One thing that I wanted to do was make sure that all the old episode links redirect to the new locations. To do this I’m building a HttpHandler that listens for all the requests ending in *.aspx (which is what the episode links did) and then look up that link in the database to redirect them to the new link. However it took me a while to figure out how to create a HttpHandler in Webmatrix. As with everything – once you know the answer it is easy but as it took me a while to figure out I’m documenting it here in case others try searching for the answer with the same keywords I was using.

The first step is to create your HttpHandler class. In the App_Code directory in your WebMatrix site create a new C# file (mine is called LegacyUrlHandler.cs). A very simple HttpHandler is below.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Web;

namespace RadioTFS
{
public class LegacyURLHttpHandler : IHttpHandler
{
public bool IsReusable
{
// The same instance of this class can be re-used so we return true.
get {
return true;
}
}

    public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context)        
    {         
        HttpResponse response = context.Response;         
        response.Write("<html><body><h1>Hello World!</h1></body></html>");         
    }         
}

}

You then have to register this HttpHandler in the web.config. Assuming this is being deployed to IIS7 you register it as follows:

..... ....

Hope that helps you. I’ll probably be blogging again over the weekend as I discover more – and I’ll definitely let you know when the new site is live.