Microsoft has released the beta of ASP.NET MVC 4, with new features including the ability to create Web APIs.

The beta works with VS 2010 and .NET 4.0, and will also be built into VS11/ .NET 4.5 beta that’s due shortly. It doesn’t work with the VS11 developer preview, so don’t try installing it alongside that. However, it can be use alongside prior releases of ASP.NET MVC.

The new features start with support for bundling and minification, which in English means you can create web apps that load faster, particularly on mobile devices.

The bundling refers to ASP.NET’s new ability to let you “bundle” or combine multiple CSS and JavaScript files into fewer HTTP requests. This causes the browser to request a lot fewer files and in turn reduces the time it takes to fetch them.

Minification lets you reduce or “minify” the download size of the content by removing whitespace, comments and other unneeded characters from both CSS and JavaScript.

Good idea, horrible terminology. Scott Guthrie’s blog has a useful post about bundling and minification, part of a series on ASP.NET 4.5.

There are other improvements aimed at making it easier to write mobile web apps and mobile web sites that are optimized for viewing on smartphones and tablets. These additions include jQuery Mobile, and also the ability to customize which view templates are used depending upon what type of device is accessing the app.

Still on the web front, the new beta lets you create HTTP services and APIs that can be called from code running on clients ranging from browsers using JavaScript, to native apps on any mobile/client platform). Scott Guthrie says the new Web API support also provides an ideal platform for building RESTful services.

The beta now comes with V2 of Microsoft’s Razor View engine which has been improved to give you better control over your view templates, including better support for resolving URL references and selectively rendering HTML attributes. Support for Async and WebSockets has also been added. Async support will come into its own with Visual Studio, as there are async language enhancements to C# and VB.

The beta also comes with WebSocket support built in so you can write apps that have tighter communication between the client browser and the server.

Scott Guthrie gave a tech-talk about the new ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta and you can watch the video below - but be warned it's long.

More Information

ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta

Scott Guthrie's Blog

Download ASP.NET MVC 4 beta

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