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

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

New Features :
· NuPack Package Manager
· Improved New Project Dialog Box
· Simplified Way to Specify Strongly Typed Models in Razor Views
· Support for New ASP.NET Web Pages Helper Methods
· Additional Dependency Injection Support
· New Support for Unobtrusive jQuery-Based Ajax
· New Support for Unobtrusive jQuery Validation
· New Application-Wide Flags for Client Validation and Unobtrusive JavaScript
· New Support for Code that Runs Before Views Run
· New Support for the VBHTML Razor Syntax
· More Granular Control over ValidateInputAttribute
· Helpers Convert Underscores to Hyphens for HTML Attribute Names Specified Using Anonymous Objects

Bug Fixes:
· The default object template for the EditorFor and DisplayFor template helpers now supports the ordering specified in the DisplayAttribute.Order property. (In previous versions, the Order setting was not used.)
· Client validation now supports validation of overridden properties that have validation attributes applied.
· JsonValueProviderFac...