Download Microsoft URL Rewrite Module for IIS7 2.0 Beta

Microsoft has released a first beta version of its URL Rewrite Module 2.0 for IIS 7. As the name suggests, this module for IIS 7 allows you to rewrite URLs. This allows you to give the user or a search engine a clearer and clearer URL; for example, the url http://example.com/Page_title has been rewritten from http://example.com/wiki/index.php?title=Page_title.

This 2.0 beta version contains all the functionality of the previous 1.1 release and adds several possibilities to also rewrite URLs generated by your web application in a desired form. The corresponding announcement looks like this:

URL Rewrite Module 2.0 for IIS 7 – Beta

Today IIS team has released the URL Rewrite Module 2.0 for IIS 7 – Beta. This is an incremental release that includes all the features from version 1.1, and adds support for outbound response rewriting. More specifically, it can be used to:

• Replace the URLs generated by a web application in the response HTML with a more user friendly and search engine friendly equivalent
• Modify the links in the HTML markup generated by a web application behind a reverse proxy.
• Fix up the content of any HTTP response by using regular expression pattern matching

Install the URL Rewrite Module 2.0 Beta

Install with Web Platform Installer
or, download:
URL Rewrite Module 2.0 for IIS 7 – Beta (x86)
URL Rewrite Module 2.0 for IIS 7 – Beta (x64)

Note:
URL Rewrite v1.0 and v2.0 cannot be installed side-by-side.
URL Rewrite v1.1 and v2.0 cannot be installed side-by-side.
If URL Rewrite v1.0 or v1.0 is already installed, uninstall it before proceeding with installing URL Rewrite Module v2.0 Beta.

New Features

URL Rewrite Module 2.0 includes the following key features:

• Rules-based response rewriting engine. Outbound rules are used to express the logic of what to compare parts of the response with and what to do if comparison was successful. Web server and site administrators can use outbound rules to define complex response rewriting logic.
• Rewriting within the content of specific HTML tags. Instead of scanning the entire response for a particular match, the rule can be configured to look only inside of certain HTML tags, such as , , etc. That way the pattern is greatly simplified and the process of applying the rule to the content is much faster comparing to applying the pattern to the entire response.
• Pre-conditions for outbound rules. Applying rewrite rules on every response is an expensive operation and is not necessary in majority of the cases. Pre-conditions are used to check the response metadata to determine if outbound rules evaluation should be applied.
• Setting of server variables and HTTP headers. Various IIS server variables and HTTP request headers can be set by using rewrite rules.
• Tracking capture groups across rule conditions. The conditions back-referencing logic in URL Rewrite 1.1 worked only against the last matched conditions. In v2 it is possible to configure back-referencing logic to work against all matched conditions.
• Logging or rewritten URLs. The module can be configured to log the rewritten URL in IIS W3C logs as opposed to logging an originally requested URL.

More information:

• Usage walkthroughs
• Configuration reference
• URL Rewrite Forum