Scott Guthrie just wrote a pretty in-depth post on the updates to the ASP.NET MVC Framework in the interim refresh.
Three changes that Scott calls out in his post are:
- Action methods on Controllers now by default return an ActionResult object (instead of void). This ActionResult object indicates the result from an action (a view to render, a URL to redirect to, another action/route to execute, etc).
- The RenderView(), RedirectToAction(), and Redirect() helper methods on the Controller base class now return typed ActionResult objects (which you can further manipulate or return back from action methods).
- The RenderView() helper method can now be called without having to explicitly pass in the name of the view template to render. When you omit the template name the RenderView() method will by default use the name of the action method as the name of the view template to render. So calling "RenderView()" with no parameters inside the "About()" action method is now the same as explicitly writing "RenderView('About')".
There is also a new MapRoute method on RouteCollection that allows one to add named-routes and then refer to them by name in various views and controllers.
You can also include different separators, like "-", ".", ";" or any other character as part of your routes. Scott has some good examples of those on his blog.
Pretty cool stuff. You can download the interim refresh here. Note that it is not an official new preview released, but a drop tossed out in the interim to probably get feedback.