I read this excellent post from ScottGu and decided to use it with a page that implemented a masterpage. I didn't have to use postbacks in my scenario, but there were links included from the masterpage. The problem is that if you use app-relative paths for your href attributes (ex: <a href="/default.aspx">) the browser (FF 2.0.0.2 and IE 7 anyways) interperets the url with pathinfo differently than a url without. The base url includes the original page (ex: http://localhost:3333/rewriter.aspx/default.aspx).

Guess what? The webserver picks up the last .aspx extension, default.aspx, that bad boy doesn't exist, and you get a 404 instead of going to http://localhost:3333/default.aspx.

In the comments, Ian Oxley suggested that you can re-base links in your page/css/other static files using the element in the head of your page. I expanded on it a little, since this behavior is only on one page of my site currently, and added the following code into the Page_Load event of the offending page:

this.Header.Controls.Add(new LiteralControl("<base href=\"" +
 Request.Url.ToString().Replace(Request.RawUrl, "").Replace(Request.PathInfo, "") +
"\">"));

Now the base tag works on both the live site and the one that WebDev.WebServer spins up as well.

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