14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is hard at work cooking a new view engine for ASP.NET. According to Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, .NET Developer Platform, the upcoming solution is codenamed Razor, and will be offered for public testing. At the end of the past week the Redmond company revealed that the Beta development milestone of Razor will be made available soon. However, Guthrie did not provide a specific deadline for the release of the first Beta for the new view engine for ASP.NET.
“ASP.NET MVC has always supported the concept of “view engines” – which are the pluggable modules that implement different template syntax options. The “default” view engine for ASP.NET MVC today uses the same .aspx/.ascx/.master file templates as ASP.NET Web Forms. Other popular ASP.NET MVC view engines used today include Spark and NHaml,” Guthrie stated. “The new view-engine option we’ve been working on is optimized around HTML generation using a code-focused templating approach.”
Microsoft had a number of design goals when building and testing Razor, attempting to create a compact, expressive, and fluid ASP.NET view engine. In addition, the Redmond company worked to ensure that customers would be able to leverage Razor immediately, by using their existing language and HTML skills. Razor is set up to work seamlessly with any text editor, including Notepad, plays nice with Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 full editor Intellisense, and comes with support for unit test views.
“We think “Razor” provides a great new view-engine option that is streamlined for code-focused templating. It a coding workflow that is fast, expressive and fun. It’s syntax is compact and reduces typing – while at the same time improving the overall readability of your markup and code. It will be shipping as a built-in view engine with the next release of ASP.NET MVC. You can also drop standalone .cshtml/.vbhtml files into your application and run them as single-pages – which also enables you to take advantage of it within ASP.NET Web Forms applications as well,” Guthrie added.