Even before there was talk about ASP.NET MVC, there were a few open source MVC frameworks available for .NET. Among them, MonoRail was best known, but there was also ProMesh.NET, a .NET MVC web framework that evolved from a small personal project to a full-blown MVC framework for building web applications in .NET, without using ASP.NET WebForms.

A few months ago, just before the release of ProMesh.NET version 2.0, we decided to move the project to the Vici Project, a project that bundles several open-source frameworks for .NET 2.0. The idea of the Vici Project is to provide .NET developers with a collection of lightweight libraries and frameworks, and at the same time get the community involved in the development and support of these libraries.

To make it easier to get the community involved, a complete system was created with the following features:

• Central SubVersion repository with online browsing (using WebSVN)
• Automated build server (using JetBrains TeamCity)
• Wiki infrastructure for maintaining documentation
• Support forum

After several months of testing all of this, the project is finally ready to go live. There is still a lot of work to be done, especially on documentation, but I think there is no point in postponing the release.

The first sub-project of the Vici Project to be released is Vici MVC, formerly known as ProMesh.NET. Later this week, 2 other projects will be released as well: Vici Parser (formerly LazyParser.NET/SharpTemplate.NET) and Vici CoolStorage (formerly CoolStorage.NET)

Vici MVC 2.0 new features (compared to ProMesh.NET 1.2)

• New powerful URL routing engine. Also supports "extension-less" URLs with IIS 7.0 or IIS 6.0 (with wildcard mapping or URL rewriting)
• Support for view components ("inline" controllers with templated views)
• Support for sub-templates with parameters
• Support for template macros
• Configurable template syntax
• Full C# 2.0 expression supported in templates
• New template language syntax (the old one is still supported)

Anyone interested in contributing to the Vici Project, please let me know by posting on the forum (or by sending me a private message on the forum. My username is activa)

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