If you want to stay up-to-date on the bleeding edge of ASP.NET MVC, you will no doubt be interested in downloading the just released ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 from here.
A few features added to ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 include:
- New Razor View Engine - This view engine made its debut as a part of WebMatrix and has now been added to ASP.NET MVC 3. Right now there is no intellisense or code highlighting, which will come in the future, but for those of you who have only used the WebForms View Engine with MVC, you will appreciate the code-centric and less verbose format.
- Global Filters - Many times you wanted to create various filters on all controllers and controller actions and thus created a base controller to hold those filters. An alternative is to use the new GlobalFilters.Filters Collection where you can add and remove filters globally in your application without burdening a base controller class with this information. This global facade isn't a new concept as you did the same thing when using multiple view engines within ASP.NET MVC using ViewEngines.Engines, etc.
- New ActionResults - You probably made these yourself, but a few new ActionResults will be in ASP.NET MVC 3, including HttpNotFoundResult, HttpRedirectResult with support for Permanent Redirects, and HttpStatusCodeResult.
- Model Binding to JSON - The DefaultModelBinder now supports JSON-encoded data which is great for ASP.NET MVC Web Applications using jQuery and other JavaScript Frameworks for a richer UI experience.
- Validation - .NET 4 introduced IValidatableObject and some enhancements in the ValidationAttribute to provide even better validation and ASP.NET MVC 3 will offer better support for them.
- Dependency Injection and Common Service Locator Enhancements - There will be lots of controversy on the best way to do it, but the concepts are sound. We need a better way to inject dependencies into not only the controllers, actions, and views that we have today, but also the harder to do modelbinders, value providers, validation providers, and other extensibility points in the ASP.NET MVC Framework. ASP.NET MVC 3 is looking at leveraging a common service locator to help pull dependencies from your IoC Container of choice, like Unity, Autofac, Windsor, Ninject, etc.
ASP.NET MVC 3 is still early and I wouldn't expect a release anytime soon for those of you just getting around to learning ASP.NET MVC 2 now that it is a part of Visual Studio 2010. Of course, I suspect ASP.NET MVC 3 will be another out-of-band release so get used to installing and using it outside the normal releases of Visual Studio.
Again, download ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 here.
David Hayden
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