Getting started with Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview with ASP.NET MVC4
Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview was released a couple weeks ago at the Microsoft BUILD 2011 conference. I have installed it side-by-side with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate on two workstations and have had no problems. My biggest interest in Visual Studio 11 was the new web development features specifically HTML5 support, ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new Page Inspector (you can run the HTML5 support and ASP.NET MVC4 in Visual Studio 2010 BTW, but the Page Inspector is a real nice productivity boost). If you haven't seen it in action yet, Phil Haack has a great presentation from the BUILD Conference (Progressively enable the mobile web with ASP.NET MVC 4, HTML5, and jQuery Mobile)
There are some steps needed to get a complete ASP.NET MVC4 development environment up beyond downloading and installing the Visual Studio 2011 Developer Preview MSI.
1) Download and install the Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview
2) Install ASP.NET MVC4 with the Web Platform Installer
- Web Platform Installer for ASP.NET MVC4 download link
- Note: you can also install ASP.NET MVC3 for Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview. Why would you want to do that? ASP.NET MVC4 is HTML5 only and MVC4 is in a preview stage.
- Download link for ASP.NET MVC3 for Visual Studio 11 Developer Preview
3) Install the Page Inspector via the Web Platform Installer
Note: If you get an error trying to to create a new ASP.NET MVC4 project stating that you need to install NuGet. Follow these instructions here. NuGet is a dependency for ASP.NET MVC4.
Now you should be on your way to more productive development now in ASP.NET MVC. It always annoyed me that I had to code-> build -> debug/inspect -> repeat..now the Page Inspector provides a nice IDE for manipulating HTML/CSS/Controller Code and get immediate feedback without the whole debug step and waiting for Visual Studio to launch my browser in IIS Express. Here is a link of a full write-up of the Page Inspector and how to enable it once you are ready to start coding.