ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 1 Released

UPDATE: This post is outdated. ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM was released in March.

Four and a half months after my team released ASP.NET MVC 1.0, I am very happy to announce that the release of our first Preview of version 2 of ASP.NET MVC is now available for download. Go download it immediately and enjoy its coolness. :) Don’t be afraid to install it as it will sit nicely side-by-side with ASP.NET 1.0.

The release notes provide more details on what’s in this release and I’ve also updated the Roadmap on CodePlex, which describes the work we want to do in Preview 2 and beyond.

After shipping ASP.NET MVC 1.0, the team and I spent time pitching in on ASP.NET 4 which was a nice diversion for me personally as I got a chance to work on something different for a while and it let ideas for ASP.NET MVC 2 percolate.

But now I’m very happy to be back in the saddle going full bore working on ASP.NET MVC again. As mentioned in the roadmap and elsewhere, ASP.NET MVC 2 will run on both ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 and ASP.NET 4. We will be shipping ASP.NET MVC 2 in the box with Visual Studio 2010 and be making a separate installer for Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 available via download.

Templated Helpers

One of my favorite new additions in Preview 1 is what we call the Templated Helpers. You can watch a short Channel 9 Video that Scott Hanselman filmed of me giving a last minute impromptu demo of Templated Helpers.

Templated Helpers allow you to automatically associate templates for editing and displaying values base on the data type. For example, a date picker UI element can be automatically rendered every time data of type System.DateTime is used.

If you’re familiar with Field Templates in ASP.NET Dynamic Data, then this is very similar to that, but specific to ASP.NET MVC.

To find out more about the helpers, check out the pre-release documentation for a walkthrough of using Templated Helpers.

We also include support for Areas and Data Annotations, along with various bug fixes and minor API improvements. Everything is detailed in the Release Notes.

The Team

I have to say, I really like being a part of a team that I feel is working very well together and am proud of the work they’ve done. Some of them already have blogs such as Eilon (rarely updated) and Brad Wilson. The QA guys recently started a podcast. But others (Levi, looking at you) really need to start a blog. ;) Great work fellas!

Be sure to let us know what you think and provide feedback in our forums!

Related Links

Note: the official name of this version of the product is ASP.NET MVC 2 and not ASP.NET MVC 2.0 as some might expect. Maybe it’s part of a new marketing initiative to get rid of dots in product names. I guess they didn’t read my Law of Demeter post to understand it’s not about reducing dots ;).

Comments

5 responses

cheap penny stocks • December 27th, 2009
very excited about the template helpers. thanks for all your hard work!!
mark • January 20th, 2010
Will this work with the VS 2010 beta?
Dale • September 7th, 2010
I'm gradually moving to asp.net from classic asp so hopefully this will help me out, thanks.
Shared Sh. • October 14th, 2010
experimented with this implementation, in order to automatically link together the Jamendo and the Musicbrainz dataset. As the current implementation is not multi-threaded (it runs the algorithm on one artist after another), it is a bit slow (one day to link the entire dataset).
orkut • November 15th, 2010
Could someone shed some light on these things MVC? Was not this design / pattern created in the 70's? These days, the cross-platform portability was almost nonexistent.
Why retro as a platform. NET to mimic something that was created in the 70's. I believe that history repeats itself. I have to find powder blue polyester suit to use while coding this matter MVC.