The ASP.Net MVC for Visual Studio 2010 RC1 is available for download from Codeplex at: http://aspnet.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=28527.

There is no new functionality but you can upgrade your current MVC projects to the 4.0 framework, or leave them "as is". Please read the release notes for a couple of key points to remember! If you never read release notes, take note of the following.

If you are working with Visual Studio Team System 2010 and the Historical Debugger is enabled, Visual Studio might occasionally crash. If you experience this problem, disable the Historical Debugger.

You can disable the Historical Debugger in Tools->Options. Note that this will be fixed in Beta 2.

Have fun!

A new feature in Visual Studio 2010 is called box selection, aka column selection, block selection, or rectangular selection. In the older versions of Visual Studio this was not possible. The only option you had was stream selection.

What this means is that you will not only be able to "copy/paste", "drag/drop", and delete box selections, but you will also have the new ability to insert and edit text on multiple lines.

Box selection allows you to manually select columns and lines at the same time.  Just hold down SHIFT+ALT+ARROW keys, and you’ll quickly get the feel for box selection. In addition to the keyboard method in the link, you can hold down the ALT key and drag with the mouse to get a rectangular selection of text.

An aspect of generics that often comes across as surprising is that the following is illegal:

IList<string> strings = new List<string>();
IList<object> objects = strings;

The second assignment is disallowed because strings does not have the same element type as objects. There is a perfectly good reason for this.

If it were allowed you could write:

objects[0] = 5;
string s = strings[0];

Allowing an int to be inserted into a list of strings and subsequently extracted as a string. This would be a breach of type safety.

However, there are certain interfaces where the above cannot occur, notably where there is no way to insert an object into the collection. Such an interface is IEnumerable<T>. If instead you say:

IEnumerable<object> objects = strings;

There is no way we can put the wrong kind of thing into strings through objects, because objects doesn’t have a method that takes an element in. Variance is about allowing assignments such as this in cases where it is safe. The result is that a lot of situations that were previously surprising now just work.

Here is an example:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Linq;

using System.Text;

namespace SimpleVariance

{

    class Animal { }

    class Cat: Animal { }

    class Program

    {

        // To understand what the new CoVariance and ContraVariance code does for you

        // Try deleting or adding the words out and in from the following 2 lines of code:

        delegate T Func1<out T>();

        delegate void Action1<in T>(T a);

        static void Main(string[] args)

        {

            Func1<Cat> cat = () => new Cat();

            Func1<Animal> animal = cat;

            Action1<Animal> act1 = (ani) => { Console.WriteLine(ani); };

            Action1<Cat> cat1 = act1;

            Console.WriteLine(animal());

            cat1(new Cat());

        }       

    }

}

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