What is the .MSPX extension?

Question

I noticed that many Microsoft sites have the * .MSPX extension. Although I am very familiar with ASP.NET, I have not seen this before.

Does anyone know what this means?

Answer 1

A few internet searches led me to http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/bkst_column_46.mspx , but that was a broken link. Fortunately, it was archived on the Wayback Machine, and you can read it here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20040803120105/http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/bkst_column_46.mspx

The .MSPX extension is part of the Microsoft Networking Project, which, according to the article above, is designed to provide a uniform appearance for Microsoft sites around the world, as well as for the site design branch of content. Here is the gist of the article:

The presentation structure includes a custom web handler built into ASP.NET. Pages that use the presentation structure have a .mspx file name extension that is registered with Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) on web servers. When one of the Microsoft.com web servers receives a request for the MSPX page, this custom web handler intercepts this call and passes it to the processing platform.

The framework first checks to see if the result is cached. If so, the page is displayed immediately. If the page is not cached, the handler looks for the URL of this page in the table of contents provided by the site owner (see below) to determine where the XML content for the page is stored. The platform then checks to see if the XML is cached and either returns the cached content or retrieves the XML from the data store specified in the table of contents.

In the file that contains the content for the page, XML tags identify the content template that will be used. The framework extracts the appropriate template and uses the XSLT series to build the page, including the header, footer, and main navigation column, and finally rendering the content in the content pane.

Answer 2

I think this is an XML-based template system that outputs HTML. I think this is only for MS.

Answer 3

Well, a little search engine found this:

The presentation structure includes a custom web handler created in ASP.NET. Pages that use the presentation framework have the .mspx filename extension, which is registered in the Microsoft Internet Services Information (IIS) on web servers. When one of the Microsoft.com website servers receives a request for .mspx, this custom web handler intercepts the call and passes its scope for processing. "

I would like to know more about this.

Answer 4

The article is still available, courtesy of the online archives: http://web.archive.org/web/20040508051618/http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/bkst_column_46.mspx

Answer 5

I love you guys, I also asked myself many times why MS uses .mspx and what is it at all ?! :)

At that time, I could not quickly find the information and suggested that it was just something on top of asp.net or maybe not even that, because you should be able to assign the same asp.net cgi dll for .mspx as well) ;

But, of course, it can be anything .. also a “special” CGI (completely next to ASP.NET) that handles this request with much better / greater cache usage, easier editing, etc.

At the end of the story it was that I came to the conclusion that maybe it is not important to know what exactly .mspx is for sure :)