The next version of ASP.NET MVC (model-view -controller) is under development with improvements to make the development and deployment workflow smoother.

Other areas that are being developed are more sharing of features with Web Forms, better AJAX support, and better support for mobile and tablet devices.

ASP.NET MVC provides a patterns-based way to build dynamic websites with full control over markup. According to the roadmap for MVC on the ASP.NET website: 

“it’s important to understand that we are in the early stages of development on ASP.NET MVC 4 and that this roadmap is a planning document for the next release. It is not a specification of what is to come. We hope to implement most or all of the features listed here, but there are no guarantees.”

The announcement goes on to ask for feedback on the plans at the Uservoice site.

Web Forms are still seen as offering a faster and easier way to develop than the MVC framework, so a new idea called recipes is being added that will hopefully make development easier under MVC.

Recipes, aka Extensible Task-Based Tooling, are designed to give you a better way of handling tasks that require you to manipulate multiple sections of an application. For example, if you want to add an Ajax grid to a view, you’ll need to generate the view code to render the HTML markup for the grid, create the data-access classes to display in the grid, and add the controller class that the Ajax grid can call asynchronously to retrieve the data. Recipes are going to help with that.

An ASP.NET MVC 4 recipe will be a dialog box delivered via NuGet with associated user interface and code used to automate a specific task. As a developer you’d fill in the dialog box to show what features you want, and the recipe will generate the HTML and JavaScript to produce that effect.

After recipes, the next improvement is to mobile development so that sites built using MVC 4 will offer a good experience if viewed on small or touch-enabled screens. This will be made easier via changes to the default project templates’ markup and CSS so that all newly created projects work as well on mobile devices as well as on desktops. For example, the viewport meta tag is being added so to minimize the need for people to zoom in and out of pages designed solely for the desktop.

There’s also going to be a new project template specifically for mobile and tablet web applications. This project template would include layouts, views, and scripts such as jQuery Mobile to produce apps that are optimized for modern mobile devices.

Ajax support is being improved, though details are thin on just how; according to the ASP.NET site,
 

“We have a few ideas already, but we’re deep in the process of application building to help us expose and understand pain points that we can fix.”

So be sure to make your comments and suggestions.