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The ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta includes a bunch of great new features and capabilities. Some of the highlights include:
Bundling and Minification -- ASP.NET MVC 4 includes the new bundling and minification support we are also adding to ASP.NET 4.5. These features enable you to build web applications that load faster and feel more responsive to users, by minimizing the number and size of HTTP requests that your pages make. Included with the MVC 4 beta are new "cache busting" helper methods that enable easy proxy caching of bundled files (with automatic invalidation if you change the cached CSS or JavaScript). You can learn more about bundling and minification from my previous blog post about it.
Database Migrations -- ASP.NET MVC 4 includes the new Entity Framework 4.3 release, which includes a bunch of great new features. One of the most eagerly anticipated features it provides is database migration support. This enables you to easily evolve your database schema using a code focused migration approach -- and do so while preserving the data within your database. I'll blog more about this in the future - you can also see a walkthrough of database migrations in this tutorial.
Web API -- ASP.NET MVC 4 includes some fantastic new support for creating "Web APIs". This enables you to easily create HTTP services and APIs that can be programmatically called from a broad range of clients (ranging from browsers using JavaScript, to native apps on any mobile/client platform). The new Web API support also provides an ideal platform for building RESTful services. I'll be blogging much more about this support soon -- it is really cool, and opens up a bunch of new opportunities. There are several tutorials, samples and screencasts covering ASP.NET Web API on the ASP.NET site to help you get started.
Mobile Web -- ASP.NET MVC 4 includes new support for building mobile web applications and mobile web sites, and makes it much easier to build experiences that are optimized for phone and tablet experiences. It includes jQuery Mobile, and includes new support for customizing which view templates are used depending upon what type of device is accessing the app. See the ASP.NET MVC 4 tutorial series.
Razor Enhancements -- ASP.NET MVC 4 includes V2 of our Razor View engine. Razor V2 includes a bunch of juicy enhancements that enable you to make your view templates even cleaner and more concise -- including better support for resolving URL references and selectively rendering HTML attributes.
Async Support and WebSockets -- You'll be able to take advantage of some additional language and runtime capabilities when using ASP.NET MVC 4 with .NET 4.5 and VS 11. Async support is one of the big ones, and the ASP.NET MVC runtime support for this combined with the new C#/VB async language enhancements (which are super elegant and clean) is going to enable you to write incredibly scalable applications. You will also be able to take advantage of the new WebSocket support built-into .NET 4.5 to build applications with even richer browser/server communication.
