The changing of the year is a time of celebration as people reflect thoughtfully on the past year and grow excited with anticipation for what’s to come in the year ahead.

Today, there’s one less thing to anticipate as we announce the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3 and NuGet 1.0!

double-rainbow
Oh yeah, this never gets old.

Install it via Web Platform Installer or download the installer directly to run it yourself.

Here are a few helpful resources for learning more about this release:

Those links will provide more details about what’s new in ASP.NET MVC 3, but I’ll give a quick bullet list of some of the deliciousness you have to look forward to. Again, visit the links above for full details.

  • Razor view engine which provides a very streamlined syntax for writing clean and concise views.
  • Improved support for Dependency Injection
  • Global Action Filters
  • jQuery based Unobtrusive Ajax and Client Validation.
  • ViewBag property for dynamic access to ViewData.
  • Support for view engine selection in the New Project and Add View dialog
  • And much more!

For those of you wishing to upgrade an ASP.NET MVC 2 application to ASP.NET MVC 3, check out Marcin Dobosz’s post about our ASP.NET MVC 3 Projct upgrader tool. The tool itself can be found on our CodePlex website.

NuGet 1.0 RTM

Also included in this release is the 1.0 release of NuGet. I’ll let you in on a little secret though, if you upgraded NuGet via the Visual Studio Extension Gallery, then you’ve been running the 1.0 release for a little while now.

If you already have an older version of NuGet installed, the ASP.NET MVC 3 installer cannot upgrade it. Instead launch the VS Extension manager (within Visual Studio go to the Tools menu and select Extension Manager) and click on the Updates tab.

Just recently we announced the Beta release of our NuGet Gallery. Opening the door to the gallery will make it very easy to publish packages, so what are you waiting for!?

At this point I’m obligated to point out that everything about NuGet is open source and we’re always looking for contributors. If you’re interested in contributing, but are finding impediments to it, let us know what we can improve to make it easier to get involved. Here’s the full list of OSS projects that make up the NuGet client and the server piece:

Show Me The Open Source Code!

As we did with ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and ASP.NET MVC 2, the source for the ASP.NET MVC 3 assembly is being released under the OSI certified Ms-PL license. The Ms-PL licensed source code is available as a zip file at the download center.

If you’d like to see the source code for ASP.NET Web Pages and our MVC Futures project, we posted that on CodePlex.com too.

What’s Next?

So what’s next? Well you can probably count as well as I can, so it’s time to start getting planning for ASP.NET MVC 4 and NuGet 2.0 in full gear. Though this time around, with NuGet now available, we have the means to easily distribute a lot of smaller releases throughout the year as packages, with the idea that many of these may make their way back into the core product. I’m sure you’ll see a lot of experimentation in that regard.