Preface

When Manning Publications approached me to write the first edition of this book, I was already a frequent blogger on the topic of ASP.NET MVC and had already published an article on the framework in CODE Magazine. Ben Sheirman, Jimmy Bogard, and I worked on the first edition of ASP.NET MVC in Action for over a year, and I was very excited to see it published in late 2009 and very well received by the developer community. Microsoft continued to release incremental previews of the next version, ASP.NET MVC 2. For this book, we brought on two new members to the author team: Eric Hexter and Matthew Hinze. The five of us started working on ASP.NET MVC 2 in Action in late 2009 with framework knowledge we cultivated in the field and experience as authors that we’d gained writing the first book.

What Microsoft did with the ASP.NET MVC release cycle was unprecedented compared to previous projects in the Developer Division. The project was released at least quarterly on the CodePlex site, source code and all. It was also developed using test-driven development as the software construction technique. Full unit test coverage is included in the source code download, and ASP.NET MVC was released under the MS-PL and OSI-approved open source license.