THE ASP.NET WEB DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM continues to grow and is used by millions of developers worldwide. A vibrant community supports the platform, both online and offline; the online forums at http://www.asp.net average 2000 questions and answers a day.

ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC 2 power news sites, online retail stores and, perhaps, your favorite social networking site. Your local sports team, book club or blog uses ASP.NET MVC 2 as well.

When it was introduced, ASP.NET MVC broke a lot of ground. Although the pattern was old, it was new to much of the existing ASP.NET community; it walked a delicate line between productivity and control, power and flexibility. Today, to me, ASP.NET MVC 2 represents choice — your choice of language, your choice of frameworks, your choice of open source libraries, your choice of patterns. Everything is pluggable. It epitomizes absolute control of my environment — if you like something, use it; if you don't like something, change it. I unit test how I want, create components as I want, and use my choice of JavaScript framework.

ASP.NET MVC 2 brings you model validation, strongly typed HTML helpers, client side validation, areas, new action filters, asynchronous controllers, model and editor templates, scaffolding UI based on the T4 code generation engine, and improved Visual Studio tooling support.

Phil, Eilon, and the ASP.NET MVC team have created version 2 of their amazing framework and given us the source. I encourage you to visit http://ww.asp.net/mvc for fresh content, new samples, videos and tutorials.

With new chapters, updated prose, and fresh samples from Jon Galloway and Phil Haack, we all hope this book represents the next step for you in your mastery of ASP.NET MVC 2.

Enjoy!

—Scott Hanselman

Principal Program Manager Lead Server and Tools Online-Community Microsoft Corporation