I would like to take this quick moment to wish each and every one of my readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Here’s hoping that Santa brings you everything you want or need. I continue to be surprised that people out there are actually interested in what I have to say. Thank you to all my readers.

Please remember to be safe as you are out celebrating the holidays.

I just had the great fortune of being able to listen to Craig Shoemaker talk about System.Web.MVC with Jeffrey Palermo. This was a great talk and I feel that I’ve really learned a lot. I’ve created a VM so that I can install VS.NET 2008 and the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions. I’m excited to start looking into this project.

Admittedly, it looks a *LOT* like Monorail and Ruby on Rails. However, this isnt necessarily a bad thing. The one thing that is becoming more and more apparent through the evolution of this project is that Microsoft in a strange way is admitting that the ASP.NET web form implementation was fundamentally flawed, and this is their way of attempting to fix it.

Also, not a bad thing. Microsoft has managed to assemble the best of the best (Hanselman, Scott Gu, Phil Haack, etc.) to address this problem. Additionally, it seems that Microsoft (via some of the previously mentioned individuals) is looking to the community for guidance in how this project gets built. Phil and Scott have strong ties to the blogging community and have done well listening to us, even though we dont always get what we want (such my post on decorating methods with the ControllerAction attribute). Phil has acknowledged that it will probably not make the final framework, but *did* offer a class that would do what I and others want.

There’s a lot of community involvement in this project, including an open source contrib project that came out days before the CTP was available. This is a great sign for how this project will progress. To everyone involved with this project, great work… and keep it up. I cant wait to see how this evolves.

This has been finally released and I have installed it on my work PC hoping to get some relief from the persistent Outlook issues that I’ve been dealing with as of late.

The update will be pushed out through Windows Update over the course of the next 3-6 months, but you can download it now, directly from Microsoft.