The name Microsoft ASP.NET MVC stands for Microsoft ASP.NET Model-View-Controller. The ASP.NET MVC Beta release provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime.

This means that developers can take advantage of the MVC design patterns to create their Web Applications which includes the ability to achieve and maintain a clear separation of concerns (the UI or view from the business and application logic and backend data), as well as facilitate test driven development (TDD).
 
The ASP.NET MVC framework defines a specific pattern to the Web Application folder structure and provides a controller base-class to handle and process requests for “actions”. Developers can take advantage of the specific Visual Studio 2008 MVC templates within this release to create their Web applications, which includes the ability to select a specific Unit Test structure to accompany their Web Application development.

The MVC framework is fully extensible at all points, allowing developers to create sophisticated structures that meet their needs, including for example Dependency Injection (DI) techniques, new view rendering engines or specialized controllers.

As the ASP.NET MVC framework is built on ASP.NET 3.5, developers can take advantage of many existing ASP.NET 3.5 features, such as localization, authorization, Profile etc.

ASP.NET MVC is an alternative, not a replacement, for ASP.NET Web Forms that offers the following benefits:
- Clear separation of concerns
- Testability - support for Test-Driven Development
- Fine-grained control over HTML and JavaScript
- Intuitive URLs

Requirements:

· .NET Framework 3.5
· Visual Sudio 2008

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· Uninstalling the Release Candidate
· If you use the Microsoft Windows installer (.msi file) to uninstall the RC release, the installer fails to uninstall some template files. This is a known issue that will be fixed for the final RTM release. To uninstall the MVC RC release, use the Add/Remove programs application in the Windows Control Panel.
· GAC Assemblies
· As with the Beta release, the RC installer installs the ASP.NET MVC assemblies (System.Web.Mvc.dll, System.Web.Routing.dll, and System.Web.Abstractions.dll) into the GAC. Prior to the Beta, these were not installed into the GAC. Because of this change, the default project templates do not automatically copy the assembly into the Bin folder of your application.
The installer also copies the assemblies to the following folder:
· %ProgramFiles%Microsoft ASP.NETASP.NET MVC RCAssemblies
· Even though the installer installs the assemblies to the GAC by default, you can copy the assemblies to an application's Bin folder. This lets you ...