From Stefan to the ASP.Net Team
I set out the following from the following What New Beta 2 document:
ASP.NET 4 introduces new options to expand the range of valid Urls applications. The simplest and most useful change is that ASP.NET gives developers the ability to use longer URLs. Previous versions limited the length of the Url path to 260 characters (limiting the path to the NTFS file). In ASP.NET 4, developers have the ability to increase (or decrease, if they choose) this limit, suitable for their applications, using two new httpRuntime configuration attributes:
Change the value of "maxRequestPathLength" to allow longer or shorter URL routes (part of the Url sans protocol, server, and query string). Change the value of "maxQueryStringLength" to allow longer or shorter query strings. ASP.NET 4 also allows developers to customize the character set used by ASP.NET Url character checks. When ASP.NET finds an invalid character in part of the Url path, it rejects the request with an HTTP 400 error. In previous versions, Url character checks were limited to a fixed character set. In ASP.NET 4, developers can customize the set of character checks using another new httpRuntime configuration attribute:
By default, the requestPathInvalidChars attribute contains seven characters that are considered invalid (the less than the characters and the ampersands encoded as the configuration is an Xml file). Developers can then expand or reduce the set of invalid characters depending on the needs of the applications. Note that ASP.NET 4 will still reject any Url paths that contain characters in the ASCII character range from 0x00-0x1F, as they are considered invalid Url characters (RFC 2396 considers these characters to be invalid, and on Windows servers running IIS6 or higher, http. The sys protocol device driver also automatically rejects Urls with these characters).
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