News

Microsoft Releases ASP.NET MVC

• By Michael Desmond
• March 30, 2009

Microsoft Corporate Senior Vice President Scott Guthrie announced the release of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 in his opening day keynote address at the MIX09 event in Las Vegas last week. The MVC tooling is available for download from the Microsoft Web site here.

Running atop the ASP.NET 3.5 runtime, ASP.NET MVC allows Visual Studio 2008 developers to take advantage of design patterns that enable a clear separation of concerns among underlying data (model), user interface (view) and application logic (controller) roles. The resulting approach isolates application behaviors, enabling adoption of test-driven development (TDD) and yielding more maintainable and reusable code. ASP.NET MVC includes templates for Visual Studio 2008 that developers can use to start work on MVC-enabled Web applications.

Bola Rotibi, principal analyst for U.K.-based research firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton, said ASP.NET MVC promises to yield better applications. "MVC is an important, if long-awaited release, and will enable developers to really apply separation of concern practices, making applications easier to maintain and reuse."

The final version of ASP.NET MVC was expected to arrive in the MIX timeframe, despite the surprise release of a Release Candidate (RC) 2 version in early March. RC2 cleaned up some bugs and updated jQuery support to version 1.3.1, among other changes.

Roger Jennings, principal at OakLeaf Systems and a frequent contributor to Visual Studio Magazine, expects MVC to quickly gain traction, picking up 25 to 30 percent of the ASP.NET developers over the next year.

Rotibi agrees that the release could kick-start adoption of the MVC architectural pattern among .NET developers. "While it is true that model view controller principles are not always well-understood or practiced widely within the development community, the support of it within the widely adopted ASP.NET will help further its understanding and use," she said.

Microsoft offers ASP.NET MVC design guidance and sample apps here.