Paternity leave is not all fun and games. Mostly it’s soothing an irate baby and toddler while dealing with explosive poo episodes. Believe me when I say the term “blow out” is apt. That’s probably not the imagery you were hoping for in a technical blog post, but I think you can handle it. ;)066 What!? It’s already time for an RC?! I think I need to be changed.

While I’m on leave, the ASP.NET MVC team continues its hard work and is now ready to announce the release candidate for ASP.NET MVC 2. Go get it now!

Download ASP.NET MVC 2 Release Candidate

As always, the release notes provide a summary of what’s changed. Also, stay tuned as I expect we’ll see one of those epic ScottGu blog posts on the release soon.

Highlights

As you might expect from a release candidate, most of the work focused on bug fixes and improvements to existing features. We also spent a lot of time on performance profiling and optimization.

Much of the focus on this release was in the client validation scripts. For example, the validation script was moved into its own file and can be included at the top or bottom of the page. Client validation also now supports globalization.

The other change related to validation is that the ValidationSummary now supports overloads where only model-level errors are displayed. This is useful if you are displaying validation messages inline next to each form field. Previously, these messages would be duplicated in the validation summary. With these new changes, you can have the summary display an overall validation message (ex. “There were errors in your form submission”) as well as a list of validation messages which don’t apply to a specific field.

What’s Next?

RTM of course! The RTM release of ASP.NET MVC will be included in the RTM release of Visual Studio 2010, which is slated for some time in March. The VS2008 version of ASP.NET MVC 2 might release earlier than that. We’re still working out those details.