Microsoft has made available a second Release Candidate build for ASP.NET MVC 2, approximately a month and a half after the first RC was delivered to testers. Phil Haack, a senior program manager at Microsoft on the ASP.NET team, revealed that ASP.NET MVC 2 Release Candidate 2 was considered necessary after Microsoft took into account the feedback received after the release of RC1. The latest development milestone of the ASP.NET MVC Framework is currently available from the Microsoft Download Center.

However, because of the short development period, early adopters should not expect major changes with the latest release. In fact, for the most part, the software giant has focused on fine tuning ASP.NET MVC 2 for the upcoming RTM milestone. The one modification that is worth mentioning is that the default validation system now validates the entire model.

“The default validation system in ASP.NET MVC 1.0 and in previews of ASP.NET MVC 2 prior to RC 2 validated only model properties that were posted to the server. In ASP.NET MVC 2, the new behavior is that all model properties are validated when the model is validated, regardless of whether a new value was posted. Applications that depend on the ASP.NET MVC 1.0 behavior may require changes,” Microsoft explained.

Of course, the Redmond company has also labored to fix bugs and boost performance for version 2 of the ASP.NET MVC Framework. Early adopters are encouraged to grab the release as soon as possible and to start testing, as the RTM milestone is very close.

“The window to provide feedback on this release is going to be very short as we are closing in on the RTM. If you want to provide input into this release, please do take the bits for a spin as soon as possible. I’m pretty excited about this release as I can see the end of the tunnel fast approaching,” Haack noted. “At this point, we’ll only be taking recall class bugs for ASP.NET MVC 2. All other bug reports will be filed against ASP.NET MVC 3. Sometime in the near future, I’ll start sharing some of our planning around that.”


ASP.NET MVC 2 Release Candidate 2 (RC2) is available for download here.