Posted on September 21st, 2011

Holy crap, ASP.NET MVC 4 already? Yep, the release cycle is becoming fairly consistent. Of course MVC 4 is not released yet, bu the developer preview is out! I'm not really sure if software is worthy of an unboxing event, but let's give it a shot. Without further ado, I present a graphical journey (that means no code in this post) through the unboxing of the ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview.

Opening Notes

Like previous releases, this one can be installed along side other versions of ASP.NET MVC. My current workstation has all 3 prior versions installed at the time of this unboxing.

Installing from the Web Platform Installer

Information about the MVC 4 Developer Preview release is available on the ASP.NET MVC site. There you will find the big green "Install Now" button that will launch the Web Platform Installer with MVC 4 pre-selected.

Apparently my machine meets all the prerequisites, and the only thing configured to install is MVC 4.

Accepting the license terms starts the install, where I am greeted with the progress bars as well as some advertising tempting me to give Windows Azure a spin.

After about a 10 minute wait I receive the "you're all clear kid" message.

Side by side

Hopping back into my Programs and Features I can see that MVC 4 has joined the party.

Visual Studio 2010 changes

Let's take a look at what the install has done to Visual Studio 2010. As expected, I am presented with a new "New Project" template.

The MVC 4 template works the same was as MVC 3, in which you select a version of MVC to target and then you are presented with project template options.

One interesting thing to note here is not only the inclusion of a "Mobile Application" template, but also if you select any of the 3 templates the "Use HTML 5 semantic markup" checkbox is automatically ticked and disabled from changing. These templates use HTML 5 in the view markup. Having this option disabled, while minor, is a nice little UI touch.

So what does the new default project look like? I created an "Internet Application" project template and tickled the F5 key...bam!

Wrapping it up...but not really 'cause it is unboxed!

So there we have it. ASP.NET MVC 4 Developer Preview installed along side my existing instances of MVC. It will be interesting to see what the process will be of updating this version of MVC 4 come release time. My assumption is that this version will need to be uninstalled prior to the install of the final release candidate. Maybe that will warrant a "Reboxing to Unboxing - How to refactor your MVC 4 install" post.