In a nutshell, the ASP.NET MVC3 engine allows developers to define a collection of Route objects. When a web request is passed from Internet Information Services to the ASP.NET MVC 3 engine, it matches up the URL of the web request with the collection of Route objects. Each Route object defines a rule, or a pattern to match against. Once the pattern has been matched for a given web request URL, the Route object alsdo defined which Controller Class and Action Method the request should be sent to in order to be handled. So, given a URL that looks like this, send it to this class and this method, or in other words, send it to this Controller and this Action.

The collection of route objects is referred to as a Route Map, it’s official name is a RouteCollection and it is configured in the Global.asax because in ASP.NET that is where these big picture types of activities happen. When you create a new ASP.NET MVC3 project, a default route is created — and in the previous videos we just used that route. In the next video we’ll start creating more route objects and will start to experience the power this provides us.

Just to solidify in our minds the connection between Controller Classes, Action Methods and Routes, we’ll experiment with an empty ASP.NET MVC 3 project and ferret out how routing works.

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