The ASP.NET MVC framework is designed on the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern. It helps you to isolate the concerns in your application and reduce coupling among components, thus facilitating code reuse, maintainability, and testability. This article takes a look at the new features in ASP.NET MVC 2.0 and also discusses some of the new features in the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 release that has just been made available to the public.
Prerequisites
You can download a copy of ASP.NET 2 RC 2 here. To work with ASP.NET MVC 2, you must have Visual Studio 2008 or later installed on your system. Alternatively, you can use Visual Studio 2010 that comes with the ASP.NET MVC Framework 2.0 engine by default.
What's New in ASP.NET MVC 2?
ASP.NET MVC 2 is compatible with .NET Framework 3.5 or later. The most important features added in ASP.NET MVC 2 include these:
- support for strongly typed HTML helpers
- enhanced support for model validation
- support for areas: These help you to segregate your application into manageable sections. Each section can then have its own controllers, views, models, and so on.
- improved support for REST: MVC 2 provides complete support for the REST architectural pattern.
- support for asynchronous controllers: You can now have controllers that are capable of processing requests asynchronously.
What's New in ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1?
ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 provides a new-looking enhanced MVC framework on top of the ASP.NET 4 runtime. The new features in this release include support for the following:
- global action filters
- URL routing
- dependency injection and integration with other dependency injection/IOC containers
- Microsoft .NET 4 data annotation and validation attributes
- multiple view engines, including even custom view engines
You can learn more about the ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 release on this blog post by Scott Guthrie. And you can download ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 here.
References
Check out these resources for more information about ASP.NET MVC 2:
How to Build Mobile Websites with ASP.NET MVC 2 and Visual Studio 2010
Action Method Selection in ASP.NET MVC 2.0
Podcast: ASP.NET 4 MVC 2 Creating an App, with Don Kiely
DOTNET Rocks Conversations: Phil Haack Introduces MVC 2
ScottGu's blog:
ASP.NET MVC 2 Released
Introducing ASP.NET MVC 3 (Preview 1)
dotnetslackers.com:
A First Look at ASP.NET MVC 2
Joydip Kanjilal ([email protected]) is a Microsoft MVP in ASP.NET. He has more than 12 years of industry experience in IT with more than six years in Microsoft .NET and its related technologies. Joydip blogs at http://aspadvice.com/blogs/joydip.
