The ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview has been added to the full list of ASP.NET MVC Tutorials, Resources, and Samples.
As part of the Microsoft Build Conference, Microsoft has released the ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview that can be installed and ran side-by-side with ASP.NET MVC 3. You can download the preview bits here. Note there is a version for Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2011, so make sure you download the correct package.
The following are new features of ASP.NET MVC 4 as mentioned in the release notes:
- Enhancements to Default Project Templates - The template that is used to create new ASP.NET MVC 4 projects has been updated to create a more modern-looking website.
- Mobile Project Template - If you’re starting a new project and want to create a site specifically for mobile and tablet browsers, you can use the new Mobile Application project template. This is based on jQuery Mobile, an open-source library for building touch-optimized UI.
- Display Modes -The new Display Modes feature lets an application select views depending on the browser that's making the request. For example, if a desktop browser requests the Home page, the application might use the Views\Home\Index.cshtml template. If a mobile browser requests the Home page, the application might return the Views\Home\Index.mobile.cshtml template.
- jQuery Mobile, the View Switcher, and Browser Overriding - jQuery Mobile is an open source library for building touch-optimized web UI. If you want to use jQuery Mobile with an ASP.NET MVC 4 application, you can download and install a NuGet package that helps you get started.
- Recipes for Code Generation in Visual Studio - The new Recipes feature enables Visual Studio to generate solution-specific code based on packages that you can install using NuGet. The Recipes framework makes it easy for developers to write code-generation plugins, which you can also use to replace the built-in code generators for Add Area, Add Controller, and Add View. Because recipes are deployed as NuGet packages, they can easily be checked into source control and shared with all developers on the project automatically.
- Task Support for Asynchronous Controllers - You can now write asynchronous action methods as single methods that return an object of type Task or Task<ActionResult>.
- Azure SDK - ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview supports the September 2011 1.5 release of the Windows Azure SDK.
ASP.NET MVC 4 and jQuery Mobile
If you are interested in developing mobile websites with ASP.NET MVC 4 using jQuery Mobile, you may be interested in the tutorial that walks you through creating a mobile website here.
David Hayden
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