Republished with Permission - Original Article
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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.
