ASP.Net MVC Futures Refresh For MVC2

Question

With the release of MVC2, what noteworthy features are included in the refresh of the MVC Futures library?

Answer 1

There are two versions of MVC Futures that sit alongside MVC 2 RTM. One version targets .NET 3.5; the other targets .NET 4. (The .NET 4 version is not a superset of the .NET 3.5 version; you must include both of them in your application if you want the entire range of functionality.) Download from http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/41742.

A non-exhaustive feature list (.NET 3.5+):

• A diagnostics page which can help diagnose runtime and assembly loading errors (see documentation).

• A new, more powerful model binding and validation system. Detailed documentation and a tutorial are available at the above link.

• Improved support for building RESTful services (see the Microsoft.Web.Mvc.Resources namespace).

• Strongly-typed ActionLink<T>().

• A slew of other filters and helpers, such as Html.Serialize() (see blog post), Html.Script(), etc.

• A slew of other value providers, such as JsonValueProviderFactory.

• The ability to turn off Session State for individual controllers to increase parallelism in your site (see documentation).

The version of MVC Futures that targets ASP.NET 4 additionally includes:

• The ability to have partial output caching, e.g. caching the result of a RenderAction() separately from the rest of the page.

• DynamicViewPage allows you to use real dynamic objects in your ViewPage, somewhat more full-featured than the default ViewPage<dynamic>.

• The ability to use DataAnnotations 4 attributes.

• Remote validation, IClientValidatable (the ability of a validation attribute to supply its own client validation info), and the ability for custom non-DataAnnotations attributes to contribute to ModelMetadata information.