How do I identify an ASP.NET MVC website?

Question

I am trying to determine whether a company has websites built with ASP.NET MVC in their portfolio. Is there a reliable way of determining that without asking them assuming that I can visit the website in question in my browser? This might seem simple, but I wasn't able to find this information online. I would think that the lack of viewstate related stuff in the HTML source and the noun-verb URL structure would be good indicators. Are there any other indicators?

Answer 1

There's absolutely no reliable way. Routing makes things even worse, you can't even say it's ASP.NET other than probably looking at the HTTP headers sent by the web server and look for indication but it's not reliable.

But here's one heuristic you which is a strong indication of ASP.NET MVC:

• ASP.NET HTTP Header sent by IIS
• Absence of ViewState in pages
• Extensionless urls
• Pretty HTML
• Presence of multiple form tags in the same page

Talking about HTTP headers, here are some you may look for:

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X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
X-AspNetMvc-Version: 1.0