Microsoft ASP.NET MVC (Preview 2 & future releases) Source Now Available on CodePlex

ScottGu's Blog - ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available

"Last month I blogged about our ASP.NET MVC Roadmap.  Two weeks ago we shipped the ASP.NET Preview 2 Release.  Phil Haack from the ASP.NET team published a good blog post about the release here.  Scott Hanselman has created a bunch of great ASP.NET MVC tutorial videos that you can watch to learn more about it here.

One of the things I mentioned in my MVC roadmap post was that we would be publishing the source code for the ASP.NET MVC Framework, and enable it to be easily built, debugged, and patched (so that you can work around any bugs you encounter without having to wait for the next preview refresh release).

Today we opened up a new ASP.NET CodePlex project that we'll be using to share buildable source for multiple upcoming ASP.NET releases.  You can now directly download buildable source and project files for the ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 release here.

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Our plans are to release regular drops of the source code going forward.  We'll release source updates every time we do official preview drops.  We will also release interim source refreshes in between the preview drops if you want to be able to track and build the source more frequently.

We are also hoping to ship our unit test suite for ASP.NET MVC in the future as well (right now we use an internal mocking framework within our tests, and we are still doing some work to refactor this dependency before shipping them as well).

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There's something very cool going on in the Microsoft DevDiv.

They seem to be embracing and living the "source available" life. We saw it in their .Net Reference Source release, the recent Silverlight 2 controls source release and now with the source release of the ASP.NET MVC.

Look these projects are not samples, nice to have things or a thin source view on top of the hidden stuff releases, but instead the source for the basic underlying foundations for the technology. No man hidden behind the curtain here, you get the full, complete and buildable source. Full source for a major new ASP.NET project, one that can/will change the way to do ASP.NET web development.

Nice work guys. This way of doing development and releasing features/products simply rocks...