Today we finally officially released the beta of ASP.NET MVC (go download it already!).

True, the release has actually been available online since yesterday as it was announced in a Keynote at VSLive by Scott Hanselman, but that was intended to be a special treat for attendees in what ended up being the worst kept secret in .NET-dom.

As usual, to get all the details, check out the latest epic installment on ScottGu’s blog. Scott Hanselman also has a great blog post with good coverage as well.

As I warned before, we no longer bundle the Mvc Futures assembly (Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll). However, we did just publish a release of this assembly updated for Beta on CodePlex. Source code for the Beta and Futures releases will be pushed to CodePlex shortly. Sorry about the delay but there’s so much work to be done here. :)

One very exciting element to this release is that we’ve included JQuery (as I mentioned before) and are indeed the first Microsoft product to include it. One of the first Microsoft products (AFAIK) to bundle a third-party open source component.

The following list (each a link to the GU’s blog) show’s what’s new in the Beta.

What’s new in ASP.NET MVC Beta?

I hope you enjoy this release and the plan from here on out is primarily to focus on stabilization. This means fixing bugs, making design change requests which we feel hit meet a high bar, and getting the product ready for RTM. However, as Scott mentioned, there are a few new features we’re planning, especially with Visual Studio tooling.