Scott Guthrie has just posted about some changes that are going to be showing up in the ASP.NET MVC Roadmap. His blog post can be found here.
Some of the things that he mentions that are coming down the pipe for the next MVC drop are:
- The ability to deploy an MVC application with the MVC library in the bin directory. This I would qualify as a bug fix, since it should be standard procedure. Current bits only allow deployment on machines on which the MVC bits are in the GAC.
- Named routes. This will be awesome.
- Re-usable Routing Infrastructure. This means we can use the routing code from anywhere, not just from the MVC bits.
- Better VS 2008 Tool Support
- [ControllerAction] now optional, new attribute can be used to hide an otherwise public action. Not sure how I feel about this. It deviates from the WCF service model where methods that can be invoked must be tagged with an attribute. I'll probably jusst continue to use the attribute for clarity's sake.
- Filter Attributes. This is huge. If you read my previous blog posts you'll know that I was trying to get forms authentication to work properly by rigging an event handler in global.asax.cs to redirect upon authentication failure. This is not ideal - the best way to do this is through filter attributes, e.g.
[Authorization(AllowRole="Administrators")]
I'm hoping they take a clue from some of the work already being written for the MVC in terms of filter attributes so that we can choose which controller and which action to invoke in case of an authorization failure. In short, I want to be able to call the Index method on SecurityController when any of my secured classes detect an anonymous user, and I want to be able to display a "you aren't part of the cool crowd" message to users with insufficient access. - HTML Helpers will be built-in. This is awesome and will definitely help out. It's a pain to get those helpers plugged into every 5-minute sample solution I build just to see how somethign works.
One thing that I see missing is a route tester and route designer. I absolutely think that in order for the MVC framewotk to take off, we need a visual route tester and a visual route designer. Who knows, since they're abstracting the route code, it's quite possible that we could write our own visual route tester when the new bits drop (not that I think we should - I think MS should provide this when MVC is ready to go).
It's looking really exicting - Its going to be hard for me to keep coding on the current bits knowing that a new drop is on the way.
tags: aspnet mvc
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