The ASP.NET MVC framework has come a long way over the last few years.

It was originally the vision of Scott Guthrie in early 2007, and with a subsequent prototype demonstration in late 2007 and the hire of Phil Haack as a Senior Program Manager, this vision became a reality. Several public previews of the framework were released over the following year, followed by the final release of ASP.NET MVC 1.0 in early 2009.

At a time when many web developers in the .NET community were becoming frustrated that other platforms had great MVC frameworks available (such as Ruby on Rails) that provided lightweight, clean, and simple ways of building web applications, ASP.NET Web Forms was losing favor. Developers struggled to make it do things for which it was never initially intended, and for many developers with a web background, the complexities of the page lifecycle and the pseudo-stateful model were very alien concepts.

ASP.NET MVC aimed to solve this problem by positioning itself as an alternative platform to Web Forms for developing web applications on the .NET platform. Taking inspiration from other frameworks such as Rails, MonoRail, and others, ASP.NET MVC provided a much cleaner way for .NET developers to build web applications.

With the second major release in March 2010, ASP.NET MVC 2 added support for several important features that were missing from the first release (such as validation, areas, and templated helpers). Now with ASP.NET MVC 4, Microsoft has built on an already solid platform and has introduced several major new changes—the new Razor view engine replaces the Web Forms ASPX engine as the default mechanism for rendering HTML, and the framework embraces many of the new features introduced with .NET 4.