ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta and Visual Studio 2010

If you’re eager to try out new things, you probably already run Visual Studio 2010 beta 2. If you do, it’s good to realize that trying out ASP.NET MVC 2 beta on the same machine isn’t really supported – not even on Visual Studio 2008. But as usual, it works just fine if you hack a bit.

The problem is that VS2010 Beta 2 ships with ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2. The IDE tooling within VS2010 is engineered to work with that version. ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta installer downright refuses to work on a computer with VS2010, because it senses the conflict.

However, as Phil Haack points out, you can fix this by uninstalling and installing things in the correct sequence. Namely,

  1. Uninstall the item called “Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2 – Visual Studio 2008 Toolsâ€
  2. Uninstall the item called “Microsoft ASP.NET MVC 2â€
  3. Run the MVC 2 Beta installer.

With these instructions, everything seems to work fine on the 2008 side. I have also noted no problems with VS 2010, although some might occur due to the mismatches between the IDE’s expectations and the runtime version.

If you don’t care about the Visual Studio experience, just get your hands on the ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta DLLs and reference them from your project. Again, the design experience may not be perfect, but it’s a no-hassle way to try out the new beta – and works both on 2010 and 2008.

December 9, 2009 · Jouni Heikniemi · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: .NET

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