Today marked the released of the first preview of MVC for ASP.NET. While it works just fine from the free Visual Web Developer Express 2008, this release is missing a project template to help you get up an running quickly.
So, I have thrown together a project template to allow you get get starting using MVC from VWD Express. Unlike VWD Express’ big brother, VWD Express seems unable to create Web Application, only Web Sites. So this template has a slightly modified layout from the one available from Visual Studio.
Since Web Site projects can only arbitrarily host classes in the App_Code directory, I have placed the Models and Controllers there. The Views are located in an appropriately named directory off of the site root.
There are two versions of this template, one for C# and one for VB.NET.
Download the template of your choice to the Visual Studio 2008\Templates\ProjectTemplates\Visual Web Developer directory located in your “My Documents” directory. After doing so, simply start VWD Express and you will notice a new template available when you go to create a new web site.
This was just something that I threw together really quickly, and is not intended to be a demonstration of MVC. It is simply a starting point for getting started quickly with MVC. If you should encounter any difficulties with this, please let me know.
Update 6/15/2008:
A more recent article of mine http://jason.whitehorn.ws/2008/06/15/Updated-Using-ASPNET-MVC-From-Visual-Web-Developer-Express-2008.aspx
discusses a better way to use ASP.NET MVC with Visual Web Developer.
