What's New in ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010)

What's New in ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010)
ASP.NET MVC is the new Framework for building web applications released by Microsoft at the
beginning of 2009. It adopts an approach that is completely different from the traditional Web
Forms one that was introduced with the release of the .NET Framework in 2002: Instead of using
an event-based programming style, ASP.NET MVC implements the Model-View-Controller
pattern so that it’s easier to achieve a better separation of concerns and it’s easier to make the
application extensible and testable.

Download What's New in ASP.NET MVC 2 (2010)

Version 1.0 has been downloaded and used by almost 1 million developers in the first year after its
final release, becoming more and more popular every month. But some thought that it was still too
unfinished for enterprise development, mainly because it was missing some important features
like client-side validation. In March 2010, after one year, version 2 of the Framework has been
released, whose main focus is to enhance productivity and make the Framework ready for
enterprise development.
ASP.NET MVC 2 is built on top of the first release and is completely compatible with it, which
means that all of your knowledge, skills, and even the code you wrote continue to work when you
move forward to the new version.
ASP.NET MVC 2 adds the following new features, which will be covered in detail through the rest
of this Wrox Blox:
Templated Helpers — Make it easier and faster to create the HTML to display and edit data.
Client-Side Validation — Brings the same powerful metadata-based validation to the client.
Areas — Allow you to organize a big application into smaller logical sections.
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What’s New in ASP.NET MVC 2?
Asynchronous Controllers — Solve the same issue addressed by the asynchronous pages in
traditional Web Forms by performing long-running tasks on a separate thread to free up
resources on the server.
Child Actions — Make easy encapsulation of logic and presentation possible.
Strongly Typed UI Helpers — Add a new strongly typed flavor to the existing UI Helpers.
And in addition to these main features, other smaller features and enhancements to the existing ones
have been introduced, together with a better Visual Studio (VS) integration, especially in VS2010.
To make the migration to the new version easier, ASP.NET MVC 2 can be installed side-by-side with
ASP.NET MVC 1.0, which means that on the same server you can have applications written in V1 and
others written in V2, making it easier to adopt the new version for new applications while taking your
time to upgrade the older ones.