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The History of ASP - Net MVC

There have been 4 major releases of ASP.NET MVC since its initial release in 2009: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 introduced the core MVC framework features, ASP.NET MVC 2.0 focused on productivity and maintenance, ASP.NET MVC 3.0 added Razor views, unobtrusive JavaScript, and other features, and a tool update integrated MvcScaffolding and NuGet packages into Visual Studio. The framework has matured over time with additional extensibility points and default implementations added in each release.

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Suzzane Khan
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101 views

The History of ASP - Net MVC

There have been 4 major releases of ASP.NET MVC since its initial release in 2009: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 introduced the core MVC framework features, ASP.NET MVC 2.0 focused on productivity and maintenance, ASP.NET MVC 3.0 added Razor views, unobtrusive JavaScript, and other features, and a tool update integrated MvcScaffolding and NuGet packages into Visual Studio. The framework has matured over time with additional extensibility points and default implementations added in each release.

Uploaded by

Suzzane Khan
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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I am starting to work on both a series of webcasts and articles and I was doing

some preparatory work, collecting information on the various features and


extensibility points that got into the various (official) releases of ASP.NET MVC,
so I thought it could have been useful to share my little summary.

There have been 3 major official releases, and 1 small tool update.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0


The first official release, dated MIX 2009, brought all the core features of the
framework, which made their way through the years till today:

Obviously, the MVC concept, with the streamlined processing pipeline and the
separation of the processing of the request (in the Controller) and the rendering
of the output (in the View)
The concept of routing (then made into the official framework)
Lightweight helpers for rendering HTML tags
Ajax helpers to easily ajaxify links and forms
Automatic binding of posted forms to .NET objects and a kind of model validation
This was a huge step toward a new web, but the first release needed a bit too much
of infrastructural development in order to be productive in enterprise scenarios
and in big applications. Luckily ASP.NET MVC was the first Microsoft product to
really be extensible. Most of the core components could be extended or even totally
replaced with your own implementation: for example, Dependency Injection was not
supported, so you had to developed your own custom controller factory to create
controllers based on a IoC container. Also there was no default model
implementation in ASP.NET and people expecting something like RoR were a bit
disappointed.

ASP.NET MVC v2
The following year, same timeframe (MIX 2010), the second version of the framework
came out. The theme of this update was enhancing productivity and making
maintenance easier in bigger applications:

Model validation based on attributes, both server and client side


Areas to partition bigger applications
Html Templated helpers, to automatically render edit forms and display pages based
on the model and attributes applied on it
Asynchronous Controllers
Lambda based Html Helpers to remove most of the "magic strings" previously needed
in html helpers
In this version a few other extensibility were introduced in addition to the ones
already available in ASP.NET MVC 1.0:

Model Metadata Provider and ModelValidationProvider


Validation Attributes and validation logic
Custom templates
The inclusion of the model validation and display attributes was also a first step
toward some kind of support for a default model inside ASP.NET MVC.

ASP.NET MVC 3
At the beginning of the year, less than a year after the previous version, version
3 was released, together with a bunch of other pretty interesting tools, like
NuGet, IIS Express and SQL Server Express.

The new features introduced with this latest version:

Works only on .NET4


Unobtrusive javascript validation and general better javascript love
Remote validation
Dependency Resolver
The new Razor view engine
Global Filters
In the context of extensibility, a few more were introduced:

Service Locator
Dependency Resolver
Filter Provider
IValidatableObject
Additionally, a new "New Project" dialog that allows you to choose different
project templates as base for your ASP.NET MVC 3 application was introduced. It
includes the usual template (with user management and login pages) but is open for
including other project templates very easily.

ASP.NET MVC Tool Update


Finally, as tradition, they released something also at MIX 2011: no changes to the
library itself, but just an upgrade to the tooling around MVC:

They integrated the great MvcScaffolding into Visual Studio, to easily create
controllers and CRUD views based on the model
Libraries included by default (jQuery, jQuery UI and modernizer for example) are
included as NuGet packages so that they can be easily upgraded
Entity Framework CodeFirst is included as default data access library in the
default project template
The default template is HTML5 enabled (if a checkbox is selected, views will have
the semantic HTML5 tags)
With this last update ASP.NET MVC finally had a default implementation of the M
part of the pattern: Entity Framework CodeFirst with automatic creation of the DB
schema, attributes for data validation and editing, and scaffolding for the
automatic generation of CRUD actions and views.

How mature is ASP.NET MVC?


The first bits of ASP.NET MVC were introduced in October 2007, at the first ALT.NET
Conference by Scott Guthrie, and it then took almost 2 year to reach the stability
need for the first release. In total we can say that ASP.NET MVC is being used by
the general public since almost 4 years: that�s a pretty long time.

I hope you found this little excursus useful and if you think I missed anything
important, please don�t hesitate to add a comment.

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