ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta: Download, Resources, Single Page Applications

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During TechDays Belgium 2012 two weeks ago, Scott Guthrie announced the Beta release of ASP.NE MVC 4 slated for that same week. Since February 16th you can now download ASP.NET MVC4 Beta.
Interesting to note is the availability of a Go-Live license with this release. In other words, if you feel like using these bits on production you now can!

A few important updates and features are part of the Beta:

  • Bundling and Minification, brought to ASP.NET 4.5 and now also integrated into ASP.NET MVC 4. This allows you to build faster applications by minimizing the number of requests to the server (bundling requests).
  • Web API integration into ASP.NET: new support for creating HTTP REST services, has built-in support for content negotiation with support for JSON, XML and Form URL-encoded formats
  • ASP.NET Mobile support through custom view engines for mobile sit.es and jQuery Mobile integration.
  • Async and WebSockets: when using ASP.NET MVC 4 with .NET 4.5 and VS 11 you’ll also be able to take advantage of the new async and WebSocket support built-into .NET 4.5.
  • Single Page Applications: new in the beta is support for building better end-to-end experience for building applications with client-side interactions using JavaScript (Upshot, History.js) and the MVVM pattern (knockout.js). On the server side the ASP.NET NET Web API is used, mainly an abstract class DataController. Note this is a new project template type in experimental phase.
    For more information on creating Single Page Applications with ASP.NET MVC 4 I recommend you watch the fantastic session Steve Sanderson did during TechDays: Building rich Single Page Applications (SPAs) for desktop, mobile, and tablet with ASP.NET MVC 4. Worth watching until the end where Steve even shows an offline capable implementation using HTML5 application cache and offline storage. These latter ones however are not yet part of the beta.

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