ASP.NET MVC has reached beta stage

Thursday, 16 October 2008

UPDATE 17.10.2008: Here are more detailed blog posts by

Last night I reviewed Twitter, as usual, and one tweet take my attention. Kevin Dente posted this status:

kdente-mvc-beta

I jumped immediately on this link and downloaded readme and binaries of ASP.NET MVC beta release.

mvcbeta-setup

What was strange, MSFT-ies are completely silent regarding this, although I tried to tweet to @Haacked and @Scottgal and to get more info on this. It seems that @shanselman demoed some beta bits on VSLive in Las Vegas.

This morning, there are some new articles that describe possible source of this information: From DotNetSlackers I found a link to this article on VS Magazine that outlines Robert Shelton as possible source of this DL link.

Beta…

mvcwebapp-beta1

I tried this beta last night – updated my UG demo from P5 to beta. Changes are not so big, and I’ll only list some of biggest:

  • Binaries are now GAC-deployed. Binaries are now both in GAC and saved in %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft ASP.NET\ASP.NET MVC Beta and they are not automatically saved to Bin folder inside MVC web app. However, you can change this behavior by setting Copy Local property to TRUE for all 3 binaries

  • HTML Helpers are in separate namespace similarly to AJAX Helpers. You need to reference both System.Web.Mvc.Ajax and System.Web.Mvc.Html namespaces in your web.config

  • Microsoft.Web.Mvc.dll is not included. As part of MVC team to make this beta as close to RTM, they’ve decided not to include MVC Futures binaries in this release. However, you can use them when by downloading from www.codeplex.com/aspnet

  • Form helper method is renamed to BeginForm.

  • Scripts now reside under root folder instead of Content, and jquery is included in project template in both .js and .min.js(minified) versions.

Besides that, there are improvements in VS template from which I already outlined some in my UG presentation:

  1. Add View from controller code
    addviewfromcontroller

  2. Add View in Views folder
    addviewinfolder

Readme file is listed on Download page . It contains very useful information about changes in this release, and I recommend reading it.

Dragan

Follow me on Twitter: @panjkov

Cross Posted from http://weblogs.asp.net/draganpanjkov