The first (and by far the longest) step in getting everything up and running is to download and install the Visual Studio 2010 beta. There are multiple flavors available, but I settled for the plain old Professional edition. You can also choose between the full install 2 ISO download (1.1 GB) or a lightweight (5 MB) “web install” package. I chose to try out the smaller package and it worked fine for me, though MSDN subscribers with slower connections may prefer to use the Microsoft download tool and download the bigger install so that they can pause and restart the download as needed. Either way, once you’ve downloaded everything grab a drink and kick off the install. On my relatively fast machine running Windows 7 it took close to half an hour to install and two (!) required restarts.

Once Visual Studio has finished installing, download and install the Asp.Net MVC 1.1 Installer for Visual Studio 2010 from CodePlex. While you’re there, go ahead and download and unzip ASP.NET MVC Snippets for VS2010 Beta 1. While Asp.Net MVC 1.1 is being installed, go ahead and install the snippets as well:

Unzip “ASP.NET MVC Snippets.zip” into “C:\Users\<username>\Documents\Visual Studio 10\Code Snippets\Visual Web Developer\My HTML Snippets”, where “C:\” is your OS drive.

If you encounter any difficulties with the installer, check out this blog post by Jacques Eloff. He developed the installer and hopefully his post can help you out. Luckily for me everything proceeded with no problems. Booting up Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 for the first time, I was presented with the new start screen:

The new startup screen of VS2010.

The new New Project dialog.

From here, you can launch the new New Project dialog either via the File menu or by clicking “Projects” on the left side of the startup screen and then clicking the “New Project” icon. If the Asp.Net MVC 1.1 installer has been correctly installed, you will find a “ASP.NET MVC Web Application” entry under the “Web” category in the New Project dialog. Fiddle with the Name, Location, and Solution Name as always and then click OK to create your application.

Just click no and setup your own test project using not-MSTest.

After clicking OK, we would expect to be presented with the dialog that asks us if we want to create a test project for our new MVC application and indeed it does appear. MSTest is listed by default as always and was the only option available to me even though I do have MBUnit and xUnit.net showing up in this dialog in VS2008. If anyone knows an easy way to get the other test frameworks working with this dialog, please leave a comment or drop me an email. To me this isn’t a big deal, as I prefer to setup my test projects manually and don’t see a lot of value in the dialog, but I’m sure some people prefer to use it. For the sake of expediency I went and ahead and let Visual Studio create an MSTest project (better than nothing, right? maybe?) and proceeded into the project and opened up a view only to hit my next stumbling block…

Not entirely legible.

The culprit here is that in Visual Studio 2008 I use a dark theme based off the Vibrant Ink-ish theme Rob Conery posted a long time ago. Evidently the upgrade process was able to transfer over most of my foreground preferences but none of my background preferences. This left me with light text on a white background. A quick hop skip & a jump through “Tools” > “Import and Export Settings…” allowed me to import the defaults, thus making my color scheme readable, if a bit too vanilla.

Now that my application is loaded up and legible, I decided I would make a couple small changes to the application and take some of the old (and new) features for a test drive to see how they did. First I tried out controller scaffolding: right-click on the MVC application’s Controllers folder and select “Add > Controller…”. That worked fine and was able to generate the CRUD scaffolding I requested. Next I tried automatic view generation: right-click anywhere inside of an action and select “Add View…”. I was pleased to find that neither of these features had been lost and were working as expected.

Note to self: delete VB snippets.

So now I’ve created a ProductController with various actions as well as a basic view for the controller’s Index action, but I don’t have any way to navigate to that action except typing the URL in by hand. Thinking this might be a good time to try out the new snippets, I opened up the Site.Master view and added a new <li></li> to the navigation element. Having not really used snippets much before, I was temporarily lost as I expected to find them in the Toolbox (were they not in there at one point?). Luckily they were even easier to find than that, all I had to do was right-click. (On a side note, this makes it much more likely that I’ll use them – the quickest way to get me to not use a Visual Studio feature is to make me deal with the horribly slow loading toolbar). The context-menu inside of views has an “Insert Snippet…” entry that, once selected, will give you three options:  ASP.NET, HTML, and My HTML Snippets. The snippets we installed earlier were placed in our user folder, which means Visual Studio will automatically detect them and load them in to the “My HTML Snippets” folder. Selecting that folder presents you with a list of many basic HTML helper snippets.

In this case I wanted to use the first one, actionlink, to create a new call to Html.ActionLink(…). Selecting it then inserted the Html helper text as I would expect, and highlighted the arguments for the link’s text and action also as I would expect. I did notice that the snippet doesn’t automatically insert a placeholder for specifying which controller the actionlink refers to and adding a comma after the last argument did not bring up the list of overloads for Html.ActionLink that I expected to see.

With that done I hit F5 and was able to browse to my Product controller’s Index action, confirming that Asp.Net MVC is indeed working fine with Visual Studio 2010. It looks like there are still some kinks to work out, but it is already close enough that I feel confident that Beta 2′s integration should be quite good.

Download ASP.Net MVC Beta

For those who, like me, have been following along with each preview push at the CodePlex project, I found a list of changes made between Preview 5 and Beta buried at the bottom of the Release Notes document. Here they are in their entirety:

Changes Made Between CodePlex Preview 5 and Beta

Even though the last official release of ASP.NET MVC was ASP.NET MVC Preview 3, many developers downloaded and used the interim CodePlex releases. This section describes changes and bug fixes that have been made between CodePlex Preview 5 and Beta.

Changes

• Changed the default validation messages to be more end-user friendly.
• Renamed CompositeViewEngine to AutoViewEngine.
• Added a Url property to Controller of type UrlHelper. This makes it convenient to generate routing-based URLs from within a controller.
• Added the ActionNameSelectorAttribute abstract base class, which serves as the base type for ActionNameAttribute. By inheriting from this base attribute class, you can create custom attributes that participate in action selection by name.
• Added a new ReleaseView method to IViewEngine that allows custom view engines to be notified when a view is done rendering. This is useful for cleanup or for view-pooling scenarios.
• Renamed the ControllerBuilder method DisposeController to ReleaseController to fit with the pattern that is established for view engines.
• Removed most of the methods on the HtmlHelper class, converting them to extension methods of the HtmlHelper class instead. These methods exist in a new namespace (System.Web.Mvc.Html). If you are migrating from Preview 5, you must add the following element to the namespaces section of the Web.config file:<add namespace=”System.Web.Mvc.Html”/>

  This makes it possible for you to completely replace our helper methods with your own.

• Changed the default model binder (DefaultModelBinder) to handle complex types. The IModelBinder interface has also been changed to accept a single parameter of type ModelBindingContext.
• Added a new HttpVerbs enumeration that contains the most commonly used HTTP verbs (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, HEAD). Also added a constructor overload to AcceptVerbsAttribute that accepts the enumeration. The enumerated values can be combined. For example, the following snippet shows an action method that can respond to both POST and PUT requests.[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post | HttpVerbs.Put)]
  public ActionResult Update() {
  }

  Because it is possible to respond to HTTP verbs that are not included in the enumeration, the AcceptVerbsAttribute retains the constructor that accepts an array of strings as a parameter.

• Modified the RadioButton helper method to ensure that every overload accepts a value. Because radio buttons are used to specify a choice from a set of possible values, specifying a value for a radio button is necessary.
• Made modifications and fixes to the default project template. This includes moving script files to a new Scripts folder. The default template uses the ModelState class to report validation errors.
• Changed action-method selection. If two action methods match a request, but only one of those has an attribute that derives from ActionMethodSelectorAttribute that matches the request, that action is invoked. In earlier releases, this scenario resulted in an exception.For example, the following two action methods are in the same controller:

  public ActionResult Edit() {
  //…
  } [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)]

  public ActionResult Edit(FormCollection form) {
  //…
  }

  In Preview 5, a POST request for the Edit action would cause an exception, because two methods match the request. In the Beta, precedence is given to the method that matches the current request via the AcceptVerb attribute. In this example, the first method will handle any non-POST requests for the Edit action.

• Added an overload for the ViewDataDictionary.Eval method that accepts a format string.
• Removed the ViewName property from the ViewContext class.
• Added an IValueProvider interface for value providers, along with a default implementation, DefaultValueProvider. Value providers supply values that are used by the model binders when binding to a model object. The UpdateModel method of the Controller class has been updated to allow you to specify a custom value provider.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug in which the ignore-routes setting (created by using the IgnoreRoute extension method) affected URL generation.
• Fixed a view engine caching bug when the application is not in debug mode (that is, when debug=”false” is set in the Web.config file). This bug occurred if different action methods in different controllers had the same name. In that case, an action method could render the view for the wrong controller.
• Fixed a bug in OutputCacheAttribute in which cached authenticated content did not require authentication. Even though the content is cached, if it requires authentication, the user should be required to authenticate first before seeing the cached content.
• Fixed a bug in which RenderPartial does not work when tracing is turned on.
• Fixed a bug in the Html.TextArea helper method in which an overload was not looking in ViewData for its value when the provided value is null.
• Fixed the OutputCacheAttribute.CacheProfile property so that it works in Medium Trust.

Upgrading from CodePlex Preview 5 to Beta

There are not many changes between ASP.NET MVC Preview 5 and Beta. However, you will need to make a few changes to your applications after you install the Beta release. Most of these changes are apparent when you try to compile your application by using the latest binaries, so we do not list every possible change. The compiler will guide you there. The following list describes some of the changes that you must make.

• Update the references to the following assemblies to point to the new Beta versions of the assemblies:System.Web.Abstractions.dll
  System.Web.Routing.dll
  System.Web.Mvc.dll

  By default, these assemblies are located in the following folder:

  %ProgramFiles%Microsoft ASP.NETASP.NET MVC Beta

• In the Web.config namespaces section, add the following namespace entry if it is not there already:<add namespace=”System.Web.Mvc.Html”/>
• The Form HTML helper was renamed to BeginForm.
• After you have made these changes, compile your application and resolve any compilation errors. Most of the errors will be the result of one of the breaking changes listed earlier.

Sunday, December 09, 2007 8:00 AM by ScottGu

Hi Panjkov,

>>>>>> is this correct link for asp.net extensions preview that will be shipped (today?) go.microsoft.com/fwlink (taken from Link)

No – that is for the ADO.NET entities bits (which is something different).  Keep an eye on www.asp.net in a few hours – the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview (which includes MVC) will be posted there shortly.

Thanks,

Scott

This is great news and rather unexpected. Time to hit up www.asp.net and F5 F5 F5…!

Update: As everyone is aware by now, I'm sure, the MVC Framework has been released. You can get it here.

Dissapointing, yes, but really for the best. The 1.2.5 release fixed quite a few bugs, but none of them show stoppers (well, for me) and 1.3 looks to add some new features to the equation.

Coming in 1.3:

• Full mono support (right out of the box)
• Updated Metaweblog API including support for creating/editing pages in WLW.
• Improved Blog importer/exporter, including support for easily switching between XML and SQL backends
• New extension manager to managing extensions and their settings.
• New events for extension writers
• Support for mobile devices
• New themes

I'm especially looking forward to the mobile device support and further Live Writer integration.

I'm sure I speak for almost all of us that are awaiting this highly anticipated release when I say that all of their hardwork is appreciated and while the delay is dissapointing, what is a few more days? The full text of Scott's comment is below:

"Quick update to everyone – we found a last minute bug late last night, and had to-do a rebuild of the bits.  This unfortunately means we won't go live today as origionally planned.  The team is working hard, though, to try and get it out ASAP (they will be here this weekend finishing the test pass).  

I'll do a blog post announcing it as soon as it is live.  As penance I'm also doing a long Part 4 blog post this weekend that covers editing and form posting scenarios, which combined with the first three tutorial posts should provide a pretty good foundation for working with the bits.

Many apologies for the delay – almost there now though,

Scott"