ASP.NET MVC Source Code Now Available

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.

Building the ASP.NET MVC Framework

You can download a .zip file containing the source code for the ASP.NET MVC Framework for the release page here.  When you extract the .zip file you can drill into its "MVC" sub-folder to find a VS 2008 solution file for the project: 

Double-clicking it will open the MVC project containing the MVC source within VS 2008:

When you do a build it will compile the project and output a System.Web.Mvc.dll assembly under a /bin directory at the top of the .zip directory.  You can then copy this assembly into a project or application and use it.

Note: the license doesn't enable you to redistribute your custom binary version of ASP.NET MVC (we want to avoid having multiple incompatible ASP.NET MVC versions floating around and colliding with each other).  But it does enable you to make fixes to the code, rebuild it, and avoid getting blocked by an interim bug you can't work around.

Next Steps

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).

Hope this helps,

Scott