About a week ago (January 13th, 2011) Microsoft released a slew of developer tools to the web.
IIS Express 7.5
This is the item I am most excited about. IIS Express is a free version of IIS 7.5 that can be used by developers when building web site. It’s somewhere between Cassini (the ASP.Net development server) and a full blown IIS 7.5 install. It provides support for SSL, URL Rewriting, and other IIS 7.x modules, while remaining under a 5mb download and running under non-administrator accounts. It runs on Windows XP and higher and will run side by side with a full IIS install or Cassini.
Visual Studio 2010 SP1 (currently in Beta) will add support in Visual Studio for setting IIS Express as your default development server.
You can download IIS Express 7.5 and run it without SP1 for Visual Studio if you wish, but you will need to manually start the server.
Related Blog Posts:
Scott Guthrie: Introducing IIS Express
Scott Guthrie: VS 2010 SP1 (Beta) and IIS Express
ASP.NET MVC 3.0
Asp.Net MVC 3.0 is a very large release including:
- The new ‘Razor’ View Engine which minimizes the number of characters used in you mark-up when data binding.
- Improved JavaScript support.
- Improved Validation.
- Partial page output caching.
- Better support for Dependency Injection and IOC Containers.
Get your hands dirty by downloading ASP.NET MVC 3.0 and trying out some demos on http://www.asp.net/mvc/.
NuGet
Nuget is a free, open source package manager that makes it easy for .NET developers to include open source libraries in any type of project from ASP.Net Web Forms to WPF.
Get the installer @ nuget.org and get started using all that open source goodness like NUnit, NHibernate, Castle.Windsor, and more.