First Preview Released for ASP.NET MVC Version 2

Scott Guthrie, vice president of Microsoft Developer Division, has announced the preview of next version of ASP.NET MVC in his blog posting ASP.NET MVC V2 Preview 1 Released.

The preview works with .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2008, and can be installed side-by-side on the same machine as ASP.NET MVC 1.0.

ASP.NET MVC V2 will include a bunch of new capabilities and features. This preview includes:

Templated Helpers. You can automatically associate edit and display elements with data types. For example, a date picker UI element can be automatically rendered every time data of type System.DateTime is used. This is similar to Field Templates in ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
Areas. You can divide dividing a large web application into multiple projects, each of which can be developed in relative isolation. This helps developers manage the complexity of building a large application by providing a way to group related controllers and views.
Support for Data Annotations. You can attach validation logic in a central location via metadata attributes applied directly to a model class. First introduced in ASP.NET Dynamic Data, these attributes are now integrated into the default model binder and provide a metadata driven means to validating user input.

For more information, see Guthrie’s posting ASP.NET MVC V2 Preview 1 Released. The source code for his code walkthrough is available from his blog. You can also learn more about the release from Phil Haack’s MVC2 post, and from the Channel9 video Phil did with Scott Hanselman about the Preview 1 release.

You can download ASP.NET MVC and the source code from CodePlex.

Bruce D. KyleISV Architect Evangelist | Microsoft Corporation

Additional resources