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Microsoft Releases New MVC Beta
Microsoft releases beta of model-view-controller framework with a go-live license.
Microsoft last month released a new beta of its ASP.NET-based model-view-controller (MVC) framework, its architecture for Web applications based on .NET 3.5 Framework.
The new MVC beta release comes with an "explicit go-live" license, allowing developers to deploy it in live production environments, said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president in Microsoft's developer group, in a blog posting announcing the release.
"The previous preview releases also allowed go-live deployments, but did so by not denying permission to deploy as opposed to explicitly granting it (which was a common source of confusion)," Guthrie wrote, adding that the current release is clearer about the license terms.
Among the updated features in the latest beta that Guthrie highlighted are a new "add-view" menu in Visual Studio and a new scripts directory under the project root. "This is now the recommended place to store JavaScript files in your application," he noted. Also, the beta now adds both ASP.NET AJAX and jQuery libraries to that folder, Guthrie added. In all, there are a dozen new features highlighted in his blog positing, which you can find here.
Scott Hanselman, a senior program manager in Microsoft's Developer Division, previewed MVC on the day of its release in a keynote address at last month's VSLive! conference in Las Vegas. During the keynote Hanselman emphasized that Microsoft is not positioning ASP.NET MVC as a replacement for Windows Forms.
"Windows Forms is not going away," Hanselman said. It's just a different way to work, one designed to give developers more control as well as significantly reduce repetitive tasks. "It's all about alternatives," he added.
While the beta is new, Microsoft has been releasing "Public Previews" of the software over the past year, with the most recent in September. The community technology preview was released last December.