At the risk of another "Me, too!" post, I thought I'd highlight several links that I have found to be helpful, and for a value-added bonus, talk about why this release matters to me. Back in the day (oh boy, does that make me sound old!), I learned how to program for the Internet by using straight HTML and Delphi to create CGI and ISAPI extensions. In order to do this, you needed to be quite aware of how the actual protocols worked, and what to do to make things behave as you'd expect. I stayed with web development up until I was using COM objects (again, written in Delphi) from an ASP page. After that, I wasn't into the web development scene much on a full-time basis.

ASP.NET 1.0 and 2.0 came along, and I found them to be quite daunting. It seemed as if it was framework built upon framework, layered with add-ins to do what I thought used to be simple things.

It appears to me that there has been a resurgence to move away from the barrage of constant abstractions, and to instead embrace the simplicity of the web (see the popularity of REST, Rails, and the buzz around ASP.NET MVC for some examples of this).

So for me, the reason I am excited is that not only can I once again utilize my knowledge about how the web works, but I can use it in new ways that will make my applications even better (e.g. TDD, scaffolding, etc.). At any rate, here's the set of links that I think matter for ASP.NET MVC:

• ASP.NET Extensions download - including the MVC bits
• MVC Toolkit - extra download to help with scaffolding (aka dynamic data controls)
• Scott Guthrie's series of tutorials: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4
• Scott Hanselman's video tutorial on the MVC framework
• Phil Haack's blog (good posts on dependency injection and TDD, among others)
• Rob Conery's blog (check out the posts on the MVC UI helpers and REST)