ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta Monday, February 20, 2012

A few days ago we released the ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta. This is a significant release that brings with it a bunch of great new features and capabilities.

The ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta release works with VS 2010 and .NET 4.0, and is side-by-side compatible with prior releases of ASP.NET MVC (meaning you can safely install it and not worry about it impacting your existing apps built with earlier releases). It supports a “go-live” license that allows you to build and deploy production apps with it. Click here to download and install it today.

The ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta will also be built-into the upcoming VS11 / .NET 4.5 beta that is coming out shortly. This week’s beta doesn’t work with the previous VS11 developer preview that shipped last September – if you are using the VS11 Developer Preview (or have it installed) you’ll want to wait until the VS 11 beta is released before trying out the new ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta functionality.

ASP.NET MVC 4 Features

The ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta includes a bunch of great new features and capabilities. Some of the highlights include:

Bundling and Minification – ASP.NET MVC 4 includes the new bundling and minification support we are also adding to ASP.NET 4.5. These features enable you to build web applications that load faster and feel more responsive to users, by minimizing the number and size of HTTP requests that your pages make. Included with the MVC 4 beta are new “cache busting” helper methods that enable easy proxy caching of bundled files (with automatic invalidation if you change the cached CSS or JavaScript). You can learn more about bundling and minification from my previous blog post about it.

Database Migrations – ASP.NET MVC 4 includes the new Entity Framework 4.3 release, which includes a bunch of great new features. One of the most eagerly anticipated features it provides is database migration support. This enables you to easily evolve your database schema using a code focused migration approach – and do so while preserving the data within your database. I’ll blog more about this in the future - you can also see a walkthrough of database migrations in this tutorial.

Web API – ASP.NET MVC 4 includes some fantastic new support for creating “Web APIs”. This enables you to easily create HTTP services and APIs that can be programmatically called from a broad range of clients (ranging from browsers using JavaScript, to native apps on any mobile/client platform). The new Web API support also provides an ideal platform for building RESTful services. I’ll be blogging much more about this support soon – it is really cool, and opens up a bunch of new opportunities. There are several tutorials, samples and screencasts covering ASP.NET Web API on the ASP.NET site to help you get started.

Mobile Web – ASP.NET MVC 4 includes new support for building mobile web applications and mobile web sites, and makes it much easier to build experiences that are optimized for phone and tablet experiences. It includes jQuery Mobile, and includes new support for customizing which view templates are used depending upon what type of device is accessing the app. See the ASP.NET MVC 4 tutorial series.

Razor Enhancements – ASP.NET MVC 4 includes V2 of our Razor View engine. Razor V2 includes a bunch of juicy enhancements that enable you to make your view templates even cleaner and more concise – including better support for resolving URL references and selectively rendering HTML attributes.

Async Support and WebSockets – You’ll be able to take advantage of some additional language and runtime capabilities when using ASP.NET MVC 4 with .NET 4.5 and VS 11. Async support is one of the big ones, and the ASP.NET MVC runtime support for this combined with the new C#/VB async language enhancements (which are super elegant and clean) is going to enable you to write incredibly scalable applications. You will also be able to take advantage of the new WebSocket support built-into .NET 4.5 to build applications with even richer browser/server communication.

I’ll be blogging a lot more about the above features in the weeks and months ahead. This is going to be an exciting release. There is a lot there that will both make you more productive (Bundling/Minification, Database Migrations, Razor V2) as well as enable you to build even richer web applications and experiences (Web API, Mobile Web, WebSockets).

Learning More About ASP.NET MVC 4

I gave a tech-talk about the new ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta at the Belgium and Dutch TechReady events last week. It provides a good overview that you can use to quickly come up to speed on the release.

You can watch or download a video of the talk for free via Channel9:

You can also download my slides (feel free to re-use them however you want).

Summary

I’m really excited about the upcoming ASP.NET releases we have coming out this year. ASP.NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4 are going to deliver a ton of new capabilities and enhancements, and the tooling updates we have coming with VS 11 and WebMatrix make the developer experience awesome.

I’ll be blogging a lot more about them in the weeks and months ahead.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. In addition to blogging, I use Twitter to-do quick posts and share links. My Twitter handle is: @scottgu