By the way my blogging frequency has declined, you can guess I’ve been quite busy here at Microsoft preparing for the next release of ASP.NET MVC.

It’s not just working on specs, design meetings, etc… that keep me busy. It’s preparing for several talks, various spec reviews, building hands on labs, demo and and app building, etc…that keeps me busy. All the while I am still learning the ropes and dealing with selling a house in L.A. and buying a house up here. There’s a lot that goes into being a PM I naively didn’t expect, on top of just how much work goes into simply moving.

Not that I’m complaining. It’s still a lot of fun. ScottGu posted an entry on his blog about the fun we’re having in preparing for the upcoming ASP.NET MVC Mix Preview.

Here’s a screenshot that shows a tooling feature I’m particularly excited about.

Unit Testing Frameworks

I’ve written about the challenges Microsoft faces with bundling Open Source software in the past and what I thought they should do about it…

What I would have liked to have seen is for Team System to provide extensibility points which make it extremely easy to swap out MS Test for another testing framework. MS Test isn’t the money maker for Microsoft, it’s the whole integrated suite that brings in the moolah, so being able to replace it doesn’t hurt the bottom line.

What we have here is similar in spirit to what I hoped for. AFAIK it is not going to be integrated to the level that Visual Studio Team Test is integrated, but it also won’t require VSTS. This is a feature of the ASP.NET MVC project template.

I’m also excited about some of the community feedback we were able to incorporate such as removing the ControllerActionAttribute among other things. A hat or two might be eaten over that one ;).

In any case, there are still some areas I’m not yet happy with (there always will be, won’t there?), so we are not done by any measure. I’ll reserve talking about that until after Mix when you have the code in your hands and can follow along.