Microsoft released ASP .NET MVC for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, you can find the installer on CodePlex. Many of the new Visual Studio 2010 features intended to support the TDD workflow fit very nicely with ASP.NET MVC, which ScottGu will describe in an upcoming blog post.

If you run into problems with the intaller, try out this troubleshooting guide by Jacques, the developer who did the installer work and do provide feedback.

You’ll notice that the installer says this is ASP.NET MVC 1.1, but as the readme notes point out, this is really ASP.NET MVC 1.0 retargeted for Visual Studio 2010. The 1.1 is just a placeholder version number. The version number was bumped to avoid runtime conflicts with ASP.NET MVC 1.0. All of this and more is described in the Release Notes… Continue reading…

If you haven’t heard yet, Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is now available for MSDN subscribers to download. It will be more generally available on Wednesday.

You can find a great whitepaper which describes what is new for web developers in ASP 4 which is included.

One thing you’ll notice is that ASP.NET MVC is not included in Beta 1. Right now, if you try and open an MVC project with VS 2010 Beta 1, you’ll get some error message about the project type not being supported. The easy fix for now is to remove the ASP.NET MVC ProjectTypeGuid entry as described by this post.

Microsoft is working hard to have an out-of-band installer which will install the project templates and tooling for ASP.NET MVC which works with VS2010 Beta 1 sometime in June on CodePlex.

(via Phil Haak’s blog)

Today Microsoft announced the first Azure Services Platform Developer Challenge.

Over the next two months, developers will have the opportunity to show off what they can do on the  Azure Services Platform

There are a couple of surprise twists to this challenge.  The first twist is this contest will have three winners – best .NET application, a top PHP application, and one more we’ll talk about in just a bit.  For the .NET application category, you should build a .NET application running on Windows Azure using ASP.NET or Silverlight to incorporate additional Azure services such as .NET Services and Live Services.  Incorporate other Microsoft, 3rd party services, or other cloud services and author a unique web, mobile, or desktop application.

For the PHP contest category … Continue reading…

The book written by Phil Haack, Scott Hanselman, Rob Conery, and Scott Guthrie is in stock at Amazon.com.

You can find the first chapter as a series of HTML articles. This is a great series which walks through the construction of the NerdDinner website. It touches upon most of the day-to-day aspects of ASP.NET MVC that you’ll want to know. It’s a great way to start understanding how the pieces largely fit together.

The rest of the book is for those who want to drill deep into the details of how the framework works. If you’re looking for reasons not to buy the book, see Rob’s post.

ASP.NET MVC is a free, fully supported, Microsoft product that enables developers to easily build web applications using a model-view-controller pattern.  ASP.NET MVC provides a “closer to the metal” web programming option for ASP.NET.  It enables full control over HTML markup and URL structure, and facilitates unit testing and a test driven development workflow.

Microsoft is releasing the ASP.NET MVC source code under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).  MS-PL is an OSI-approved open source license.  The MS-PL contains no platform restrictions and provides broad rights to modify and redistribute the source code.  You can read the text of the MS-PL at: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html. More about MVC … Continue reading…