Tonight marks the long awaited arrival of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP. The buzz around this release has been huge for weeks now and the time has finally come for the community to have a chance to play with the actual bits. All those demos you’ve seen, and all that sample code you’ve examined can be put to life at last!
So what all exactly is included in this package? I’m glad you asked:
- ASP.NET MVC
- ASP.NET Dynamic Data
- ASP.NET Silverlight Controls
- ASP.NET AJAX History
- ADO.NET Entity Framework
- ADO.NET Data Services
If all that wasn’t enough, the MVC toolkit is also now available for download. What is the MVC toolkit you ask? It is a collection of additional functionality that enhances the usability/ease-of-use of the MVC framework, including a massive slew of helper methods, and stronger support for marrying the Dynamic Data functionality with the MVC framework. The classes in the toolkit may eventually be merged into the main CTP bits, but for now they are delivered as a separate package.
There have also been new forums created on the ASP.NET forums for the individual features of the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions. Make sure to post any feedback and/or issues you have when playing with the bits, it will be greatly appreciated.
Now that the public has access to the CTP, you can expect to see tons of articles popping up focusing on its contents. You can rest assured that I will be going crazy with it and posting lots of information. I will make sure to cover the importance and different user stories for each of the CTP’s features.
Also don’t forget about the MVC Contrib project. Now that the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions CTP has been released you can expect to see lots of activity around the project.
Links:
- ASP.NET Extensions 3.5 CTP
- MVC Toolkit
- Quickstarts
- ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Forum
- ASP.NET MVC Forum
- ASP.NET Dynamic Data Forum
- MVC Contrib
To simply aggregate the existing available material surrounding ASP.NET MVC, here is a list of articles that should get you started:
- ASP.NET MVC Part 1
- ASP.NET MVC Part 2: Routing
- ASP.NET MVC Part 3: ViewData
- ASP.NET MVC Part 4: Forms
- ASP.NET MVC UI Helpers
- ASP.NET MVC: TDD & DI
If you’re more of a visual learner, Scott Hanselman put together an awesome screencast introduction to ASP.NET MVC framework here.
Have fun! And please once again feel free to email me any questions: joncart at microsoft dot com.
Chad Myers just put together an awesome article showing the usage of the script.aculo.us JavaScript library to perform AJAX functionality along with ASP.NET MVC. This post is a perfect example of the flexibility that ASP.NET MVC has and the creativity I think it breeds in developers.
