Q:

How to automatically remap .html pages to .aspx pages?

We have a website; which, till now had only HTML pages. Now we are redeveloping it in ASP .Net.
This means that all the .html pages will be changed to .aspx extension. The problem is, there are a lot of external references to these pages, and we dont want to go and chage each and every link to aspx right away.
Is there any way to redirect a link to .html pages to .aspx pages? For example, is there any way that the server checks the file specified, finds out that it links to .html page and automatically opens the .aspx page?

A:

I would take this opportunity to leave extensions (.html, .aspx, etc) behind.
For all our major websites we now use a custom mapping system, whereby a virtual page URI is mapped to a specific .aspx (or.html) page. This has a few benefits:

Your visitors see "nicer" URIs;
You're free to re-organise your site as you see fit, behind the scenes, without breaking existing incoming links;
You can use dynamic virtual URIs, eg instead of /Product.aspx?p=Blah, you can use /Products/Blah

We have our own custom system, but I believe ASP.NET MVC now has this feature built-in.
(If you go down this route, you can add legacy mappings for .html URIs that point to your new .aspx pages).

A:

if you do some sort of url rewriting you can have all the links stay the same and just serve up the aspx pages, request for index.html gets mapped to index.aspx
here's what ms says about asp.net url rewriting:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx

