I recently upgraded MiniBlog from using WebPages/Razor 2 to version 3. The upgrade was completely painless. I just upgraded the NuGet package and it didn't even touch my web.config. Thumbs up to the Razor team for that!

Everything seemed to work fine, but then I noticed that my root-relative links such as <a href="~/category/web-essentials"> didn't work correctly anymore. The ~/ no longer pointed to the root of my web application, but instead to the first path segment of my URL. So, when the browser was at /post/my-post, then the ~/ in my link would resolve to <a href="/post/category/web-essentials">. This was wrong.

The reason is that I use URL rewrites in my web.config to map /post/whatever to /index.cshtml?slug=whatever and that was the reason for this strange behavior. Here's my rewrite rule:

<rule name="slug" stopProcessing="true">
  <match url="^post/(.*)" ignoreCase="true"/>
  <action type="Rewrite" url="/index.cshtml?slug={R:1}"/>
< /rule>

So in order to use WebPages/Razor 3 with URL rewrites like mine, I had to tell Razor to ignore the <rewrite> segment in my web.config. That's easily done in global.asax like so:

public void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
     Context.Items["IIS_WasUrlRewritten"] = "false";
}

Now Razor correctly maps to the root of the website when using ~/.  

Not all cases

This little workaround is only needed if your URL rewrites happen in the path of the URL, but not if you use sub-domain rewrites. For instance, if you use URL rewrites to map sub.domain.com into domain.com/sub then it all works fine and you don't need this workaround.

Due to the brand new HTML editor in Visual Studio 2013, static HTML files no longer has the Design|Split|Source options enabled by default.

That’s because the new HTML editor is the default editor for all HTML files with the exception of ASP.NET Web Forms files (.aspx, .ascx, .master). However, it is only the Web Forms editor that has support for the designer and split view.

So all we have to do is to map our .html or .htm files to use the Web Forms editor instead of the new HTML editor.

Simply right-click any .html/.htm file in Solution Explorer and select Open With…

Now select HTML (Web Forms) Editor, click Set as Default and then hit OK.

All files with the same extension will now always open in the Web Forms editor and you get both Design- and Split view.

I also recorded a short video showing a different way to accomplish the same thing.