Microsoft is gearing up to release version 1.0 of ASP.NET MVC by the end of this month. Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of the .NET Developer Division at Microsoft, indicated that the Redmond giant was aiming for a February 2009 launch of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 at the end of the past month as the Release Candidate (RC) build of the solution went live. For the time being, ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RC is available for download, with the software giant indicating that the release is officially supported as an integral part of the ASP.NET MVC framework.

“RC is the last public release of ASP.NET MVC that we’ll ship prior to the final “1.0” release,” Guthrie stated. “We expect to ship the final ASP.NET MVC 1.0 release next month. In addition to bug fixes, today’s build includes several new features. It also includes some refinements to existing features based on customer feedback.”

In order to deploy the RC build, Microsoft advised users to first uninstall any previous releases of the solution. Only after removing previews or Beta releases of ASP.NET MVC and closing down all instances of Visual Studio 2008 should the installer of the new bits be launched. According to Guthrie, ASP/NET MVC 1.0 RC brings to the table a range of improvements taking to the next level Visual Studio Tooling, the view capabilities, the form post, unit testing, Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF) protection, file handling, and AJAX. Joe Cartano, SDET Visual Web Developer revealed that ASP.NET MVC 1.0 RC was already being served through the Web Platform Installer.

“We are pretty excited to be in the final “home stretch” of ASP.NET MVC V1. Please report any issues you find with the RC build as soon as possible so that we can get them resolved for the final release. The team plans to carefully monitor feedback over the next few weeks, and assuming no big issues come up ship the official V1 build next month,” Guthrie added.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.