News
Microsoft Posts ASP.NET MVC Beta for Download
- By Becky Nagel
- October 15, 2008
Today Microsoft released the official beta for ASP.NET MVC, its model view controller architecture for Web applications based on the .NET 3.5 Framework.
The beta's availability was announced Wednesday afternoon on Microsoft Product Evangelist Robert Shelton's blog. At the same time his colleague, Scott Hanselman, a senior program manager in Microsoft's Developer Division, was previewing the beta during his keynote at VSLive! Las Vegas.
During the keynote, titled "MVC and Dynamic Data," Hanselman told the audience that ASP.NET MVC should not be seen as a replacement for Windows Forms -- "Windows forms is not going away" -- it's just a different way to work, one designed to give developers more control as well as significantly reduce repetitive tasks.
"It's all about alternatives," he commented.
One feature Hanselman demonstrated was how MVC gives Web developers complete control over their URLs, meaning that Web pages won't need to have .asp, .aspx or any other "dot" extension (unless developers want to use them). He also showed off some of the dynamic data capabilities of MVC, including some future capabilities scheduled to be released next summer.
While the beta is new, Microsoft has been releasing "Public Previews" of the software over the past year, with the most recent coming in Sept. The community technology preview version was released in December 2007.
Hanselman closed his keynote by emphasizing that the MVC team does not want to develop a modeling environment in a vacuum -- he encouraged attendees to contact him and his colleagues with any and all feedback.
According to Hanselman, the release of the ASP.NET MVC beta will officially be announced on Scott Guthrie's blog Thursday morning.