Mark Fox's Weblog

Microsoft has released a second release candidate of the ASP.NET MVC toolkit. Most changes focus on the install experience:

• Setup will now require .NET 3.5 SP1
• Bin deployment to 3.5 host without SP1 still possible
• New server-only install mode

With these changes Microsoft decided on another release candidate before the release to manufacturing.

Microsoft has announced the first release candidate of the ASP.NET MVC toolkit with a final version expected next month. In the announcement Scott Guthrie provided examples of some of the new features over the previous betas.

• Several new Visual Studio tooling features including Add Controller, Add View, Adding and Customizing Scaffold Templates
• View Improvements
• Form Post Improvements
• Unit Testing Improvements
• Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Protection
• File Handling Improvements
• AJAX Improvements

A good resource for developers wondering why they shouldn’t just stick to ASP.NET Web Forms is the new book Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise by Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello. It helps one move away from the drag and drop model of development to one that allows for more robust, maintainable, and reliable applications.

Some random observations as I explore the recent ASP.NET MVC beta.

1) As of October 26 the downloadable projects for the ASP.NET MVC demos were written for a version prior to the beta and will not run under the beta versions of ASP.NET MVC. Best bet is to create your own projects and type the code in yourself.

2) If you ever accidently set a view as the start page clear it by setting the start action in the project property page titled "Web" to Specific Page with an empty value. Otherwise the routing rules do not work.

Scott Guthrie has announced that Microsoft has just released the Preview 3 build of the ASP.NET MVC framework. He stated that it includes some additional features over April’s interim build, enhancements/refinements, and Visual Studio tool integration and documentation See this post for download links.

In terms of future direction, Guthrie states:

We are starting to feel good about the URL routing and Controller/Action programming model of MVC, and feel that those areas are starting to bake really well. In future preview releases you'll start to see more improvements higher-up the programming model stack in areas like Views (html helpers, validation helpers, etc), AJAX, sub-controllers and site composition, deeper Login, Authentication, Authorization and Caching integration, as well as data scaffolding support.

He also promises a very long tutorial/ into to ASP.NET MVC shortly.