Jacques Eloff

Even though we announced the release of MVC 2 (for Visual Studio 2008) on March 12, we are still working on getting a few more goodies out. And although not as awesome as canned unicorn meat (I don’t think anything can beat that), it is still very exciting. Today we released the source code of MVC 2 to the Microsoft source and symbol servers. Those of you using Visual Studio 2008 can now debug your applications and step into the MVC 2 RTM source code. If you are using one of the preview versions of MVC that shipped with prelease versions of Visual Studio 2010 then you will need to be a bit more patient until the final product ships since the assembly you are using needs to match the RTM version.

Today we announced the release candidate of ASP.NET MVC 2. Apart from some bug fixes, client validation has undergone some significant changes, amongst others, making it easier to work with custom validators. You can find more details about all the changes in the readme. As usual, Phil Haack also made an announcement.

Today, the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta was announced. It’s packed with new features including client validation, an empty MVC project, and the asynchronous controller to name a few. You can visit the links below to learn more about the new features.

Today, MVC for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 was announced. You can find more details about it on Phil’s post. For the better part of the last month I’ve done little except churn out new installers for MVC, so I’m really happy to finally see one of them going out the door instead of heading to my recycle bin. The first thing you will probably notice when running the new installer, apart from the version number being 1.1, is that it is now a self-extracting EXE as opposed to just being a single MSI.

Once you are done writing your MVC application you will probably start looking at deploying it. In many instances, creating a simple web deployment project should suffice, but if you decide to distribute your application using an MSI then you will most likely need to determine whether MVC is installed on the target system. The simplest way to do this when using WIX is to specify a launch condition. For MVC 1.0 there are two options at your disposal to create a property for a launch condition.