• Download ASP.NET MVC 2 using the Microsoft Web Platform Installer
• Download ASP.NET MVC 2 from the Download Center

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

I’ll be presenting in Glasgow, Scotland on March 25th

I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Glasgow on March 25th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet.

You can learn more about the event and register for free here.  There are only a few spots left – so register quickly. 

When the event fills up there will be a wait-list – please add yourself to this as we’ll be encouraging people who won’t be able to attend to let us know ahead of time so that we can add more people to the event.

I’ll be presenting in Birmingham, England on March 26th

I’m doing a free 5 hour presentation in Birmingham (UK) on March 26th. I’ll be covering VS 2010, ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET Web Forms 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, Silverlight and also potentially show off a few new things that haven’t been announced yet.

You can learn more about the event and register for free here.

The event unfortunately filled up immediately (even before I had a chance to blog it) – but there is a waitlist.  If you’d like to attend please add yourself to it as hopefully a number of people will be able to attend off of it.

UK Party at MIX

If you are going to MIX and are from the UK send mail to phil@pixelprogramming.com (or tweet him @plip) for an invite to a party being organized for UK MIX attendees next Sunday (March 14th).  Knowing the people involved I’m sure the party will be fun. <g>

Cool MIX10 iPhone App

Speaking of MIX (and UK developers), Chris Hardy has posted a cool new MIX10 iPhone application on the Apple AppStore.  The free application helps track sessions, rooms, etc.  You can learn more about it from Chris’ blog post here.  The app works for everyone – not just those from the UK.

Hope this helps,

Scott

We shipped the VS 2010 RC on Monday, and have seen some great feedback regarding performance and stability with it.

One issue, though, that we have seen a number of people run into is an intellisense crash that happens very frequently on machines that have UI Automation enabled and certain devices connected.

Crash Symptom

If you are encountering frequent VS 2010 crashes when you are typing in the editor while Intellisense is popping up and/or being dismissed then you are running into this issue.

Why does the crash happen?

The most common cause of the crash happening is that you are running a machine that:

• Is a Tablet PC (even if you aren’t using the pen)
• Has multi-touch screen drivers enabled
• Has an external input device like a pen or Wacom tablet
• Has a screen-reader enabled

It turns out that a late fix right before the RC shipped modified a UI input code path that unfortunately exposed this bug.

A patch is coming to fix this issue

We are working on shipping a VS 2010 RC patch that we’ll release next week that will fix the issue and prevent it from occurring.  I’ll blog a pointer to the patch once it is available.

How to work around the issue now

There are two ways you can work around the issue now.  One is to disable your Tablet services (read this article for details on how to do this) and/or disable Multi-touch/Pen drivers on your system.  The other is to set a registry key.

You can read about both of these workaround in this VS Team Blog Post.

What if you still see crashes?

Please send me email (scottgu@microsoft.com) if you are still seeing any crashes after trying out these steps (or encounter crashes for non-Intellisense scenarios) – we’d like to make sure we investigate and follow-up any others you encounter.

Hope this helps,

Scott

A few people have emailed me recently asking about the availability of a Visual Studio –vsdoc intellisense hint file for jQuery 1.4.1. 

I blogged about –vsdoc files in the past – they provide additional intellisense help information for Visual Studio, and enable you to get a richer intellisense experience with dynamic Javascript libraries.  If you are using VS 2008 SP1 you’ll want to download and install this patch in order to have VS 2008 automatically use –vsdoc files with intellisense.  VS 2010 has support for –vsdoc files built-in.

jQuery 1.4.1 –vsdoc download

The good news is that you can download –vsdoc files for jQuery directly from the jQuery web-site (look for the “Documentation: Visual Studio” link under each major version).  Here is a direct pointer to the recently released –vsdoc file for jQuery 1.4.1 that you can use.

Hope this helps,

Scott

This is the fifteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s post covers a nice addition to ASP.NET and Windows Forms with .NET 4 - built-in charting control support.

ASP.NET and Windows Forms Charting Controls

A little over 14 months ago I blogged about how Microsoft was making available a free download of charting controls for both ASP.NET 3.5 and Windows Forms 3.5. 

You can download and use these runtime controls for free within your web and client applications today.  You can also download VS 2008 tooling support for them.  They provide a rich set of charting capabilities that is easy to use.  To get a sense of what all you can do with them, I recommend downloading the ASP.NET and Windows Forms sample projects which provide more than 200 samples within them.  Below is a screen-shot of some pie and doughnut chart samples from the ASP.NET sample application:

Charting Controls Now Built-into .NET 4

With .NET 3.5 you had to separately download the chart controls and add them into your application.  With .NET 4 these controls are now built-into ASP.NET 4 and Windows Forms 4 – which means you can immediately take advantage of them out of the box (no separate download or registration required). 

Within ASP.NET 4 applications you’ll find that there is now a new built-in <asp:chart> control within the “Data” tab of the Toolbox:

You can use this control without having to register or wire-up any configuration file entries.  All of the charting control configuration is now pre-registered with ASP.NET 4 (meaning nothing has to be added to an application’s web.config file for them to work).  This enables you to maintain very clean and minimal Web.config files.

Learning more about the <asp:chart> control

Scott Mitchell has written a great series of articles on the www.4guysfromrolla.com site on how to take advantage of the <asp:chart> control:

1. Getting Started - walks through getting started using the Chart Controls, from version requirements to downloading and installing the Chart Controls, to displaying a simple chart in an ASP.NET page.
2. Plotting Chart Data - examines the multitude of ways by which data can be plotted on a chart, from databinding to manually adding the points one at a time.
3. Rendering the Chart - the Chart Controls offer a variety of ways to render the chart data into an image. This article explores these options.
4. Sorting and Filtering Chart Data - this article shows how to programmatically sort and filter the chart’s data prior to display.
5. Programmatically Generating Chart Images - learn how to programmatically create and alter the chart image file.
6. Creating Drill Down Reports - see how to build drill down reports using the Chart control.
7. Adding Statistical Formulas - learn how to add statistical formulas, such as mean, median, variance, and forecasts, to your charts.
8. Enhancing Charts With Ajax - improve the user experience for dynamic and interactive charts using Ajax.

His articles are written using .NET 3.5 and the separate ASP.NET charting controls download – but all of the concepts and syntax work out of the box exactly the same with ASP.NET 4.

Michael Ceranski has also written a blog post demonstrating how to use the ASP.NET Chart control within an ASP.NET MVC application.  I’m hoping someone will create some nice ASP.NET MVC Html.Chart() helper methods soon that will make this even easier to do in the future.

Hope this helps,

Scott

Earlier this evening the ASP.NET team shipped ASP.NET MVC (Release Candidate 2) for VS 2008/.NET 3.5.  You can download it here.

The RC2 release of ASP.NET MVC 2 is a follow-up to the first ASP.NET MVC 2 RC build that we shipped in December.  It includes a bunch of bug fixes, performance work, and some final API and behavior additions/changes.  Below are a few of the changes between the RC1 and RC2 release (read the release notes for even more details):

• The new ASP.NET MVC 2 validation feature now performs model-validation instead of input-validation (this means that when you use model binding all model properties are validated instead of just validations on changed values of a model).  This behavior change was based on extensive feedback from the community.

• The new strongly-typed HTML input helpers now support lambda expressions which reference array or collection indexes.  This means you can now write code like Html.EditorFor(m=>m.Orders[i]) and have it correctly output an HTML <input> element whose “name” attribute contains the index (e.g. Orders[0] for the first element), and whose “value” contains the appropriate value.

• The new templated Html.EditorFor() and Html.DisplayFor() helper methods now auto-scaffold simple properties (and do not render complex sub-properties by default).  This makes it easier to generate automatic scaffolded forms.  I’ll be covering this support in a future blog post.

• The “id” attribute of client-script validation message elements is now cleaner.  With RC1 they had a form0_ prefix.  Now the id value is simply the input form element name postfixed with a validationMessage string (e.g. unitPrice_validationMessage).

• The Html.ValidationSummary() helper method now takes an optional boolean parameter which enables you to control whether only model-level validation messages are rendered by it, or whether property level validation messages are rendered as well.  This provides you with more UI customization options for how validation messages are displayed within your UI.

• The AccountController class created with the default ASP.NET MVC Web Application project template is cleaner.

• Visual Studio now includes scaffolding support for Delete action methods within Controllers, as well as Delete views (I always found it odd that the default T4 templates didn’t support this before).

• jQuery 1.4.1 is now included by default with new ASP.NET MVC 2 projects, along with a –vsdoc file that provides Visual Studio documentation intellisense for it.

• The RC2 release has some significant performance tuning improvements (for example: the lambda based strongly-typed HTML helpers are now much faster).

Today’s RC2 release only work with VS 2008 and .NET 3.5.  We’ll shortly be releasing the VS 2010 RC (which will be available for everyone to download). It will include ASP. NET MVC 2 support built-in (no separate download required).

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. The source code for the ASP.NET MVC RC2 release (along with a MVC futures library that goes with it) can be downloaded here. You can learn even more about ASP.NET MVC 2 by reading the ASP.NET MVC 2 blog series I’m working on.

I’ve been working on a series of blog posts the last few months that cover some of the new features coming with .NET 4 and VS 2010.

Earlier today someone pointed me at some nice “quick hit” videos that have been published that also provide quick first looks at some of the new features coming with ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010.  These videos aren’t an exhaustive list of everything new – but do provide a great way to quickly learn about many of the cool new things coming with the release. 

ASP.NET 4 Videos

You can learn more about some of the new ASP.NET 4 features by watching these 22 ASP.NET Quick Hit Videos.

VS 2010 Videos

You can learn more about a few of the new VS 2010 features by watching these 8 VS 2010 Quick Hit Videos.

ASP.NET Team Member Interviews

In addition to the feature demo videos above, you can also watch these ASP.NET team member interviews done by Scott Hanselman.  In them various ASP.NET team members talk about a few of the new features they’ve worked on.

There are a lot more features coming with .NET 4 and VS 2010 not covered by all of these videos.  But hopefully the above clips provide a good way to quickly get a sense of some of the new capabilities.

Hope this helps,

Scott

This is the fourteenth in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.  Today’s post covers some of the output caching extensibility improvements being made to ASP.NET 4.  These can be used by all ASP.NET 4 applications – including those built using both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC.

Output Caching Today

ASP.NET 1.0 introduced the concept of output caching, which enables developers to capture and store the generated output of pages, controls, controllers, and HTTP responses in an in-memory cache.  On subsequent web requests, ASP.NET can then serve content faster by retrieving and using the generated output from the cache instead of having to execute the page/controller to regenerate the output from scratch.  This can dramatically improve the performance of your application – especially in cases where your content is based on data within a database (since when the content is output cached you end up not having to hit the database on subsequent requests).

ASP.NET’s output caching system is flexible enough to enable you to cache different versions of content depending on the querystring/form-post parameters to a page/controller (for example: Browse.aspx?category=Beverages versus. Browse.aspx?category=Meat).  It also enables you to cache different versions based on the browser type or user-language preference of the client visiting your application. This allows you to cache a mobile version of a page separate from a version optimized for a desktop browser, as well as to vary the cache entries based on whether the user wants to read a page in English or French.  You can configure ASP.NET to cache a particular output cache entry for a specific period of time (for example: 1 minute – after which the next request will regenerate the content and cache it again).  You can also configure ASP.NET to dynamically invalidate a cache entry based on an external event (for example: if the database upon which the cached content depends changes). 

One limitation of output caching with ASP.NET V1->V3.5, though, is that the cache store itself is not extensible – and the cached content always has to be stored in-memory.

ASP.NET 4 Output Cache Extensibility

ASP.NET 4 adds an extensibility point to output caching that now enables developers to configure one or more custom output-cache providers. Output-cache providers can use any storage mechanism to persist output cached content. This makes it possible to easily create output-cache providers that store the cached content using any persistence mechanism – including local or remote disks, databases, cloud storage, and distributed cache engines (like memcached or velocity).

You can create a custom output-cache provider by creating a class that derives from the new System.Web.Caching.OutputCacheProvider class in ASP.NET 4.  Within your derived class you then override 4 public methods that provide implementations for adding/removing/retrieving/updating cached content (a unique key is passed to identify each separate cached entry).  You can then configure ASP.NET 4 to use your custom outputcache provider by registering it using the new <providers> subsection of the <outputCache> element within an application’s web.config file:

Above I’ve added a new output cache provider (which I’ve named “SampleCache”) that is implemented using the “ScottOutputCache” class within my OutputCacheSample.dll assembly.  I’ve also configured ASP.NET to use my “SampleCache” implementation as the default output cache implementation whenever content is output cached – this is done by setting the “defaultProvider” attribute on the <outputCache> element. 

And now, when I add an OutputCache directive to the top of any of .aspx page the content will be cached and stored using my ScottOutputCache provider:

<%@ OutputCache Duration="60" VaryByParam="None"  %>

Likewise, if I add an [OutputCache] attribute on any action method within an ASP.NET MVC Controller the content will also be cached and stored using my ScottOutputCache provider:

Customizing Which Output Cache Provider is Used

Above I configured ASP.NET to by default always cache content using my “SampleCache” provider whenever output caching is used within the application.

As a slightly more advanced option, developers can also configure ASP.NET to dynamically choose which output cache provider to use on a per-request basis.  This is useful for scenarios where you want to have a slightly richer set of cache semantics. For example, you might want to cache the “Home” page or "Top 10" requested pages of a site using the built-in ASP.NET in-memory provider (which will be super fast because the content will be in-memory), and then cache less frequently requested pages that get lower traffic on disk.

You can dynamically indicate which output cache provider to use on a per-request basis by overriding the GetOutputCacheProviderName() method within the Global.asax file of an application.  Below I’m indicating that for the “Home.aspx” page within my application I want to use the built-in in-memory ASP.NET output cache provider – and that I then want to use whatever is registered within the web.config file for every other request:

This ability to easily switch between providers depending on scenarios ends up enabling a bunch of really powerful scenarios.

Common Output Cache Providers

We’ll be shipping samples that demonstrate how to implement a disk-based output cache provider that stores cached content on the file-system.  We’ll also be shipping samples that demonstrate how to integrate output caching with the new Windows Server AppFabric Caching Service (formerly known as “Velocity”).  AppFabric’s caching service will be a free, fully supported, Microsoft distributed cache system.  It will also be easy to use the new ASP.NET 4 output caching extensibility with memcached – a popular open source distributed caching system.

You can learn more about how to create providers by watching Stefan Schackow’s ASP.NET 4 Core Runtime talk at PDC 2009.  You can also learn more about AppFabric’s Caching service from this PDC 2009 talk.

Summary

The addition of output-cache provider extensibility to ASP.NET 4 enables developers to easily pursue more aggressive and more intelligent output-caching strategies for web sites and applications.  These can significantly improve the performance and responsiveness of applications, and improve both end-user experiences as well as reduce the amount of server resources required. 

Hope this helps,

Scott