At long last I am happy, relieved, excited to announce the release candidate for ASP.NET MVC. Feel free to go download it now. I’ll wait right here patiently.

A while back on a lark, I posted a prototype demonstrating how one could use Routing within Web Forms. This is something you can do today with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, because of the work we did to separate Routing from ASP.NET MVC. I would have liked to include Web Form Routing as part of the Routing feature when we were working on SP1, but we didn’t have the time to do so in a robust manner before SP1 was locked down.

UPDATE: Be sure to read Peli’s post in which he explores all of these implementations using PEX. Apparently I have a lot more unit tests to write in order to define the expected behavior of the code.

I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep lately, so I thought last night that I would put that to use and hack on Subtext a bit. While doing so, I ran into an old Asynchronous Fire and Forget helper method written way back by Mike Woodring which allows you to easily call a delegate asynchronously.

Rob pinged me today asking about how to respond to requests using different formats based on the extension in the URL. More specifically, he’d like to respond with HTML if there is no file extension, but with JSON if the URL ended with .json etc…

TRIPLE UPDATE! C# now has string interpolation which pretty much makes this post unnecessary and only interesting as a fun coding exercise.

At the end of the year, it’s very common for bloggers to take a look back at their own blog and list their favorite 10 blog posts. I find that somewhat narcissistic, so you know I’m going to do that.

Dmitry, who’s the PUM for ASP.NET, recently wrote a blog post about an interesting approach he took using VB.NET XML Literals as a view engine for ASP.NET MVC.

I was reading Jeff Atwood’s latest post, Programming: Love it or Leave it when I came across this part, emphasis mine.

A while ago ScottGu mentioned in his blog that we would try and have an ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate by the end of this year. My team worked very hard at it, but due to various unforeseeable circumstances, I’m afraid that’s not gonna happen. Heck, I couldn’t even get into the office yesterday because the massive dumping of snow. I hope to get in today a little later since I’m taking next week off to be with my family coming in from Alaska.

ASP.NET Routing is useful in many situations beyond ASP.NET MVC. For example, I often need to run a tiny bit of custom code in response to a specific request URL. Let’s look at how routing can help.

UPDATE: There’s a workaround mentioned in the Google Groups. It’s finally resolved.

While at PDC, I met Louis DeJardin and we had some lively discussions on various topics around ASP.NET MVC. He kept bugging me about some view engine called Flint? No… Electricity? No… Spark!

I’m working to try and keep internal release notes up to date so that I don’t have this huge amount of work when we’re finally ready to release. Yeah, I’m always trying something new by giving procrastination a boot today.

A Subtext user found a security flaw which opens up Subtext to potential XSS attacks via comment. This flaw was introduced in Subtext 2.0 by the feature which converts URLs to anchor tags. If you are still on 1.9.5b or before, you are not affected by this issue. If you upgraded to 2.0, then please update to 2.1 as soon as you can.

How many of you out there who use Subtext host it on a hosting provider who does not have ASP.NET 3.5 available? I’d like to make the next version of Subtext 2 take a dependency on 3.5. Note that it wouldn’t have to take a dependency on SP1. Just ASP.NET 3.5 proper as I believe most hosting providers support it.

UPDATE: If you run ASP.NET MVC on IIS 6 with ASP.NET 4, setting up extensionless URLs just got easier. In most cases, it should just work.

As I mentioned before, I’m really excited that we’re shipping jQuery with ASP.NET MVC and with Visual Studio moving forward. Just recently, we issued a patch that enables jQuery Intellisense to work in Visual Studio 2008.

I recently learned about a very subtle potential security flaw when using JSON. While subtle, it was successfully demonstrated against GMail a while back. The post, JSON is not as safe as people think it is, covers it well, but I thought I’d provide step-by-step coverage to help make it clear how the exploit works.

Pop quiz. What would you expect these three bits of HTML to render?