Asp.Net MVC flavours

The main purpose of the MVC (Model, View and Controller) architecture is to make separation of the business layer (logic) and the application layer (data)  from the presentation layer to the user. Model-View-Controller is a software pattern for achieving isolation between different application components. Its always desirable for software applications (especially web-based applications) that there must be clear separation between business logic and the user interface. A model represents the state of a particular aspect of the application. A controller handles interactions and updates the model to reflect a change in state of the application, and then passes information to the view. A view accepts necessary information from the controller and renders a user interface to display that information. Over past few years many version of ASP.Net MVC were release moving towards more and more mature framework for web development.Below is brief comparison of features release in each version

MVC 5 – October 2013

• Bootstrap replaced the default MVC template.
• ASP.NET Identity for authentication and identity management.
• Authentication Filters for authenticating user by custom or third-party authentication provider.
• With the help of Filter overrides, we can now override filters on a method or controller.
• Attribute Routing is now integrated into MVC 5

MVC 4 – August 2012

• ASP.NET Web API, a framework that simplifies the creation of HTTP services and serving a wide range of clients.
• Follow to create your first ASP.NET Web API service
• Adaptive rendering and other look-n-feel improvements to Default Project Templates.
• A truly Empty Project Template.
• MVC4 also uses Razor View Engine as a default view engine with some new features like condition attribute and ‘Tilde slash’
• Based on jQuery Mobile, new Mobile Project Template introduced.
• Support for adding controller to other project folders also.
• Task Support for Asynchronous Controllers.
• Controlling Bundling and Minification through web.config.
• Support for OAuth and OpenID logins using DotNetOpenAuth library.
• Support for Windows Azure SDK 1.6 and new releases.
• MVC4 provides better support for Jquery like Jquery Mobile
• Client side validation, Jquery validation and enhanced support for asynchronous methods
• Supports many new features for mobile apps and also provides new mobile project template and default templates are refreshed and modernized

MVC 3 – January 2011

• New Project Templates having support for HTML 5 and CSS 3.
• Improved Model validation.
• Razor View Engine (.cshtml for c# and .vbhtml for Visual Basic) introduced apart from Web Forms view engine (.aspx)
• Having support for Multiple View Engines i.e. Web Forms view engine, Razor or open source.
• Controller improvements like ViewBag property and ActionResults Types etc.
• Unobtrusive JavaScript approach, Ajax and Client side Validation, Jquery Validation and JSON binding support
• Chart, WebGrid, Crypto,WebImage, WebMail Controls
• Improved Dependency Injection with new IDependencyResolver.It provides powerful hooks with Dependency Injection and Global Action Filters
• Partial page output caching.
• TempData, ViewData ,ViewBag
• Supports not only Master Page but also Layout Page

MVC 2 – March 2010

• MVC 2 uses only Web Forms view engine (.aspx) as a default View Engine.
• (HTML Syntax) Web Forms view engine syntax: <%=Html code %>
• TempData, ViewData
• Jquery support is Good
• Supports only Master Page
• Client-side Validation and Asynchronous controllers
• support controllers to process requests asynchronously
• Supports validations using the RangeAttribute, RequiredAttribute, StringLengthAttribute, and RegexAttribute attributes.

MVC 1 – March 2009

MVC CTP – December 2007 

* Notes

• View Engine is responsible for rendering of the HTML code from your views to the browser.
• In ViewData, dictionary of objects are accessible via strings as keys
• ViewBag was added in the C# 4.0 which uses the dynamic feature that allows to add properties of an object dynamically . We can say that ViewBag = ViewData + dynamic feature around the ViewData dictionary