Should I start on ASP.NET MVC 1 or MVC 2 Beta?

Question

I'm just starting to get into ASP.NET MVC, and saw today that the Beta of version 2 has been released.

Should I start on MVC 1 given that there are already a lot of great resources and tutorials? Or should I go straight to MVC 2 to take advantage of whatever improvements have been made?

I'm thinking about breaking this into another question, but I guess the followup question is what are the major differences? Are the version 1 tutorials appropriate to get me into version 2?

Update:

I thought it was worth updating this question to mention that I started running through Scott Guthrie's great NerdDinner tutorial. I highly recommend it.

After running through that, I started using it in my own project and almost immediately hit a snag. I wanted to reuse partials across different areas of my site. If the partial belongs to a different controller, no can do. However, MVC 2 has Html.RenderAction which solves the problem for me.

Answer 1

Things seem to be improved in MVC 2 but a grounding in MVC 1 will not hurt at all; in fact it will probably be to your advantage. After you have used the MVC framework for a little while, you might find (like I did!) that you want to use it in your production work. I try to avoid beta in my production stuff so to this end, I would advise jumping on MVC 1; you can still check out the MVC 2 beta as they install side-by-side fine.

Enjoy!

Dan

Answer 2

Personally I would forget 1 and just jump in with 2. By the time you are finished with any project, 2 will probably be out of Beta. Most of the MVC1 tutorials will be generally applicable to 2. If something doesn't work just check if it's down to a difference between the versions. (In fact if you stick with 1 you are not guaranteed that all the tutorials will be 100% acurate anyway, as many tutorials relate to pre-release versions of 1). 2 adds some handy features like Areas, which you are likely to want to use.

Answer 3

I will probably go with MVC 1.0 first, before going to MVC 2.0. beta. For many reasons

• MVC 1.0 is stable and If I learn it, then its very easy for me to learn MVC 2.0 as its mostly will be some added features to MVC 1.0

• Second reason being that, I can get a lot of reliable resources and quick help for MVC 1.0 than MVC 2.0 beta (on which everyone will be experimenting, and are not sure)

So, I suggest going with MVC 1.0 as I am not expecting any ground breaking changes with MVC 2.0 beta (MVC 1.0 itself is sufficiently good), and I am expecting this beta to be some improvements that are based on community feedback.

So, For your last question, I do think that MVC 1.0 Tutorials will be inline with the coming versions of MVC.

Edit:

New features in MVC 2.0 Beta, link in response to your comment Damovisa .. :)

http://haacked.com/archive/2009/11/17/asp.net-mvc-2-beta-released.aspx

Thanks

Answer 4

In my opinion the best way is to learn from ground in MVC 1.0 and at the same time looking how to make some things easier with MVC 2.0. The reason is that you wil have no problems with workning in both version. For example in my company we have projects for asp .net mvc 1.0 and some earlny dev. projects written in mvc 2.0.