You can build your own copy of the ASP.NET MVC assemblies by
downloading the MVC source and compiling it locally, or alternatively you can
download a VS Template package to get a pre-built version of them along with a
Visual Studio project template that you can use to quickly build a new ASP.NET
MVC Project that uses the latest bits.
After you install the ASP.NET MVC source refresh .VSI
template, a new "ASP.NET MVC Application" project template will show
up under the "My Templates" section of your "New Project"
dialog:
Figure 1
This new "My Templates" version of
the MVC project template lives side-by-side with the previous ASP.NET MVC
Preview 2 release (which you can see above it in the main project templates
section of the dialog). This allows you to safely create new projects and
and use both the latest source version and the last official preview version on
the same machine.
When you create a new project using this
updated ASP.NET MVC Project template you'll by default get a project that looks
like below:
Figure 2
This new project solution contains one
Controller ("HomeController") under the "\Controllers"
directory and two View templates ("About" and "Index")
under the "\Views\Home" sub-directory. Both view templates are
based on a common master page for the site ("Site.master"), all of
whose styles are defined within a "Site.css" file under the
"\Content" directory.
When you run the application the built-in
web-server will automatically start up and you'll see the site's
"Home" content:
Figure 3
Clicking the "About us" tab will
then display the "About" content:
Figure 4
The "HomeController" class in the project is
responsible for handling both of the URLs above and has two action methods like
below:
Figure 5
The default "Site.master" template looks for a
"Title" value in the ViewData collection and uses it to render the
<title> element of the HTML page. The default "Index"
view template looks for a "Message" value and uses it to render the
home page's welcome message. You can obviously go in and customize these
files however you want.