At long last I am happy, relieved, excited to announce the release candidate for ASP.NET MVC. Feel free to go download it now. I’ll wait right here patiently.
There have been a lot of improvements made since the Beta release so be sure to read the release notes. I’ve tried very hard to be thorough in the notes so do let me know if anything is lacking. We are also pushing new tutorials up to the ASP.NET MVC Website as I write this.
Also, don’t miss ScottGu’s usual epic blog post describing the many improvements. There’s also a post on the Web Tools team blog covering tooling aspects of this release in detail. As I mentioned when we released the Beta, we didn’t have plans for many new features in the runtime, but we did have a lot of tooling improvements to add. I’ve already described some of these changes in a previous blog post, as did ScottGu in his detailed look.
Our goal with this release was to fix all outstanding bugs which we felt were real showstoppers and try to address specific customer concerns. We worked hard to add a bit of spit and polish to this release.
Unfortunately, a few minor bugs did crop up at the last second, but we decided we could continue with this RC and fix the bugs afterwards as the impact appear to be relatively small and they all have workarounds. I wrote about one particular bug so that you’re aware of it.
For now, I want to share a few highlights. This is not an exhaustive list at all. For that, check out Scott’s post and the release notes.
Ajax
Yes, I do know that jQuery released a new version (1.3.1), and no, it is not in this release. :) We just didn’t have time to include it due to the timing of its release. However, we are performing due diligence right now and plan to include it with the RTM.
We did make some changes to our Ajax helpers to recognize the standard X-Requested-With HTTP header used by the major JavaScript libraries such as Prototype.js, jQuery, and Dojo. Thus the IsMvcAjaxRequest method was renamed to IsAjaxRequest and looks for this header rather than our custom one.
ControllerContext
ControllerContext no longer inherits from RequestContext, which will improve testing and extensibility scenarios. We would have liked to make changes to RequestContext, but it was introduced as part of the .NET Framework in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. Thus we can’t change it in our out-of-band release.
Anti Forgery Helpers
These helpers were previously released in our “futures” assembly, but we’ve fixed a few bugs and moved them into the core ASP.NET MVC assembly.
These are helpers which help mitigate Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. For a great description of these helpers, check out Steve Sanderson’s blog post on the topic.
MVC Futures
I added a couple of expression based helpers to the ASP.NET MVC futures assembly, Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll. These are just samples to demonstrate how one could write such helpers. I’ll add a few more by the time we ship the RTM. Note, if you’re using the old futures assembly, it won’t work with the new RC. You’ll need to update to the new Futures assembly.
In case you missed it the first time, click here for the Download.
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