Microsoft has today made available Preview 1 of it's ASP.NET MVC framework's third major version.
The MVC framework is an alternative to the older WebForms development style used in ASP.NET. It allows for extra flexibility, efficiency and development speed by seperating business logic, routing and rendering into distinct components in the framework.
MVC 3 brings a wide range of features and improvements to the framework.
Razor, a new view engine that Microsoft recently announced, is now built-in to the framework, and you can start using it with Preview 1 by selecting it from the New View dialog. Preview 1 does not include full code intellisense and code colours for Razor, but will do in future versions.
There is also a range of useful upgrades to ActionResult types, which allow you to easier specify problems that you may have had in the Action. For example, the HttpNotFound result automatically returns an HTTP 404 response code; permanent redirects can now be sorted easily by using RedirectPermanent, RedirectToRoutePermanent and RedirectToActionPermanent; and HttpStatusCode is useful for sending back a custom response code and description.
There are also improvements to Javascript/AJAX, Controllers, and model validation. You can read more about those on this very detailed blog by Scott Guthrie.
MVC 3 is backwards compatible, and you can go download it now from Microsoft.
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