Is MVC4 baked into .NET 4.5?

Question

A lot of release notes for Visual Studio 2012 talk about .NET 4.5 and MVC4, but I can't tell if MVC4 is actually part of the .NET 4.5 release. Anybody know for sure? I would love not to have to install MVC separately on my server.

Answer 1

No, ASP.NET MVC 4 is baked into VS2012, exactly the same way ASP.NET MVC 3 was baked into VS2010 but not part of .NET 4.0 (there was a separate download that you could install on your servers). But there will also be a separate download of ASP.NET MVC 4 for VS2010 SP1 in which you obviously won't be able to use the .NET 4.5 specific features, such as async/await, but you will still be able to develop an ASP.NET MVC 4 application and target .NET 4.0.

Answer 2

ASP.NET MVC has made a point of NOT being tied to a particular .NET incarnation. That way, you can use the latest and greatest irrespective of what .NET version your hosting provider uses.

If the provider supports ASP.NET, that's all you need to know.

For this precise purpose, ASP.NET MVC is bin-deployable, meaning you can deploy the MVC dlls yourself, along your application - without requiring special rights from the hosting provider.

Phil Haack has a great article describing how to bin-deploy MVC3. There's even tooling support in VS for this scenario!

I assume the workflow for newer MVC incarnations is similar.