UPDATE: This post is a out of date. We recently released the Release Candidate for ASP.NET MVC 3.

Feels like just yesterday that we released ASP.NET MVC 2 to the world and here I am already talking about an early preview. In a way, we’re right on schedule. It was almost exactly a year ago that we released Preview 1 of ASP.NET MVC 2.

Today I’m happy to announce that ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 is available for download. Give it a try out and let us know what you think. Some key notes before you give it a whirl:

  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 tooling requires Visual Studio 2010
  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1 runtime requires the ASP.NET 4 runtime

As usual, to find out what’s in this release, check out the release notes. Also at the recent MVCConf, a virtual conference about ASP.NET MVC, I recorded a talk that provided a sneak peek at ASP.NET MVC 3 Preview 1. The audio quality isn’t great, but I do demo some of the key new features so be sure to check it out.

So what’s in this release that I’m excited about? Here’s a small sampling:

  • Razor View Engine which ScottGu wrote about recently. Note that for Preview 1, we only support the C# version (CSHTML). In later previews, we will add support for the VB.NET version (VBHTML). Also, Intellisense support for Razor syntax in Visual Studio 2010 will be released later.
  • Dependency Injection hooks using service locator interface. Brad Wilson should have a few blog posts on this over the next few days.
  • Support for .NET 4 Data Annotation and Validation attributes.
  • Add View dialog support for multiple view engines including custom view engines.
  • Global Action Filters

In the next few days you should see more details about each of these areas start to show up in various blog posts. I’ll try to keep this blog post updated with relevant blog posts so you can find them all. Enjoy!