One of the great benefits of the ASP.NET MVC Framework is that you do not have to use the Webforms View Engine. There are plenty of other view engines, like Spark, Brail, NHaml, NVelocity. XSLT, etc.
Personally, I think one of the cooler view engines is Spark, which was just released as 1.0 on CodePlex.
You can download the Spark View Engine here. Learn more here.
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The Entity Framework Team released the Entity Framework Feature CTP 1, which appears to give you a less invasive Entity Framework in the domain layer of your applications by allowing you to use the Entity Framework using POCO Entities without a visual designer while still getting the benefits of self-tracking. I haven't tried this as of yet, so I cannot comment on the implementation. Unfortunately this will not be a part of the .NET Framework 4.0. This will require a separate download when everything is fully released.
The features included in this CTP are :
- Templates for Self-Tracking Entities (N-Tier support)
- Templates for POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) Entities
- Code-Only Programming Model that allows you to write Entity Data Model based applications without requiring external artifacts
Download it here.