Download the MSI and Release notes here.

Last night we released ASP.NET CodePlex Preview 5 on CodePlex. Be on the lookout for one of those famous epic blog posts from ScottGu describing the release. In the meanwhile, the release notes contain short write-ups of what has changed.

We didn’t originally plan to have another preview. However, we implemented a few significant chunks of functionality and were dying to get feedback so that we could incorporate it into the product before Beta. It helps that with five or so of these interim releases, we’ve become pretty efficient producing these releases.

We plan to have our next release be our official Beta, which means we’ll have a lot more test passes to produce and run before we release the next one.

In the meanwhile, take the code for a test drive and let us know what you think. Some of the naming needs to be cleaned up, so you can expect some name changes and improvements to the API from here to Beta, along with a lot of bug fixes and a few more features. Naming classes is tough, so we appreciate good suggestions there. :)

One change that I think I forgot to mention in the release notes is that the Ajax helpers do not accept inline script any longer, they take method names. Those helpers are all in their own namespace now as extension methods which allow you to completely swap them out with ones of your own.

If you’re interested in more details about how our action method selection works, be sure to read my post entitled How a Method Becomes an Action. Be sure to keep an eye on Brad Wilson’s blog too, as he put in some work on this feature and will describe the view engine changes.

UPDATE: Brad just blogged about partial rendering and view engines in ASP.NET MVC.