I’m happy to announce that the final release of ASP.NET MVC 2 is now available for VS 2008/Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with ASP.NET 3.5. You can download and install it from the following locations:

The final release of VS 2010 and Visual Web Developer 2010 will have ASP.NET MVC 2 built-in – so you won’t need an additional install in order to use ASP.NET MVC 2 with them.

ASP.NET MVC 2

We shipped ASP.NET MVC 1 a little less than a year ago. Since then, almost 1 million developers have downloaded and used the final release, and its popularity has steadily grown month over month.

ASP.NET MVC 2 is the next significant update of ASP.NET MVC. It is a compatible update to ASP.NET MVC 1 – so all the knowledge, skills, code, and extensions you already have with ASP.NET MVC continue to work and apply going forward. Like the first release, we are also shipping the source code for ASP.NET MVC 2 under an OSI-compliant open-source license.

ASP.NET MVC 2 can be installed side-by-side with ASP.NET MVC 1 (meaning you can have some apps built with V1 and others built with V2 on the same machine). We have instructions on how to update your existing ASP.NET MVC 1 apps to use ASP.NET MVC 2 using VS 2008 here. Note that VS 2010 has an automated upgrade wizard that can automatically migrate your existing ASP.NET MVC 1 applications to ASP.NET MVC 2 for you.

ASP.NET MVC 2 Features

ASP.NET MVC 2 adds a bunch of new capabilities and features. I’ve started a blog series about some of the new features, and will be covering them in more depth in the weeks ahead. Some of the new features and capabilities include:

New Strongly Typed HTML Helpers

Enhanced Model Validation support across both server and client

Auto-Scaffold UI Helpers with Template Customization

Support for splitting up large applications into “Areas”

Asynchronous Controllers support that enables long running tasks in parallel

Support for rendering sub-sections of a page/site using Html.RenderAction

Lots of new helper functions, utilities, and API enhancements

Improved Visual Studio tooling support

You can learn more about these features in the “What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 2” document on the www.asp.net/mvc web-site.

We are going to be posting a lot of new tutorials and videos shortly on www.asp.net/mvc that cover all the features in ASP.NET MVC 2 release. We will also post an updated end-to-end tutorial built entirely with ASP.NET MVC 2 (much like the NerdDinner tutorial that I wrote that covers ASP.NET MVC 1).

Summary

The ASP.NET MVC team delivered regular V2 preview releases over the last year to get feedback on the feature set. I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who tried out the previews and sent us suggestions/feedback/bug reports.

We hope you like the final release!

Scott