14 DAY TRIAL // The first beta development milestone of ASP.NET MVC 2 was released by Microsoft at the Professional Developers Conference 2009, in Los Angeles (PDC 2009) last week. At the time of this article, the bits for ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta are up for grabs via the Microsoft download center. A release aimed at ASP.NET developers, ASP.NET MVC 2 is designed to help them leverage a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework that sits on top of the ASP.NET 3.5 Service Pack 1 runtime. The promise from Microsoft is that devs that take advantage of the ASP.NET MVC 2 framework will be able to build not only highly testable, but also maintainable web applications in accordance with the MVC pattern.
“MVC is a model-view-controller framework on top of the existing ASP.NET runtime that separates display and application logic as well as makes test-driven development of ASP.NET applications easier. MVC could be used with a variety of types of web applications but is frequently associated with REST applications,” explained Nicholas Allen, program manager at Microsoft, working on Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Silverlight, and other projects for the .NET Framework.
Early adopters can access both the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta bits, as well as the source code. As is the case with a variety of Microsoft products for which the company shares the source code with third-party developers, the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta project is hosted on CodePlex and available under a Microsoft Source License for ASP.NET Pre-Release Components. Developers that need additional details to get started can also access the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta Release Notes.
Microsoft underlines that ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta comes to the table with support only for .NET Framework 3.5. According to Allen, the MVC 2 beta and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 don’t exactly match on a component which is shared only with Visual Studio 2008.
“The framework encourages developers to maintain a clear separation of concerns among the responsibilities of the application – the UI logic using the view, user-input handling using the controller, and the domain logic using the model. ASP.NET MVC applications are easily testable using techniques such as test-driven development (TDD),” Microsoft explained. “The installation package includes templates and tools for Visual Studio 2008 SP 1 to increase productivity when writing ASP.NET MVC applications.”
ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta is available for download here.
The RTM edition of .NET Framework 3.5 Service Pack 1 (SP1) was released in August 2008 and is available for download here.
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server and Team Suite SP1 VPC Image is available for download here.
Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server SP1 VPC Image can be downloaded from here.