Microsoft has unveiled plans for world domination. Well, Rich Web App domination at least.

It’s still early days for ASP.NET MVC 4,  but the Roadmap is available, with some features that promise to give other MVC frameworks like Spring and Django a run for their money.

If you’re feeling adventurous you can already get your hands on the MVC 4 Developer Preview – it should happily co-exist alongside your MVC 3 install.

Microsoft have boldly proposed that they aim to make ASP.NET MVC  “the best web platform for building modern rich web apps“….and looking at the interest we’ve had in our MVC 3 courses, we can well believe that there is faith among developers that the chaps at Redmond can back this sort of claim up.

Some of the proposed MVC 4 new features include:

• Improved development workflow
• Easier deployment, better performance, scalability & security – especially in relation to the Cloud / Windows Azure
• MVC 4 Recipes – extensible tools to help automate code creation for otherwise lengthy tasks such as authentication and writing AJAX grids.
• Excellent Mobile / Tablet support
  • new and improved templates for a much nicer experience across various platforms and screen sizes (for users and developers alike!)
  • jQuery Mobile integration
  • Support for overriding Views for specific devices
  • built-in “Device Switcher” so users have control over whether or not to view the mobile or desktop version of your web app’s UI for instance
• Better support for AsyncController Classes – less code needed for asynchronous action methods
• Other mooted improvements and additions in areas like AJAX, HTML5, WCF Web API, AppFabric, & mobile web project templates…

As stated, MVC 4 is very much in its infancy, so any or all of these features could change drastically or be struck off entirely, but we’ll be keeping a ear to the ground as the roadmap firms up, and we’ll no doubt be including a hands-on overview of the MVC 4 beta in our MVC 3 training course as soon as it’s available.

Scribbled by Tom