Microsoft's newest initiative for ASP.NET, the Model View Controller (MVC) Framework, has been released as a Beta 1 after 5 iterations in "Preview" mode.
After many years of ASP.NET's major reliance on its Web Forms technology, which has regularly under performed especially in larger application, we see ASP.NET moving back toward the traditional HTML form posting (classic ASP style) request processing, you can read more about ASP.NET Web Form Disadvantages in an earlier blog posting, another great article that highlights this can be found on Jeffrey Palermo's blog (http://jeffreypalermo.com).
This move frees us from the "single form tag" problem widely experienced by developers, eliminates the overhead of ViewState, and helps to promote better code organization through a true separation of concerns by organizing our code into separate layers of functionality that can reach 100% code coverage via automated tests (the Test Driven Development mantra that many developers embrace with open arms).
This release of ASP.NET MVC also includes full support for the jQuery JavaScript library, which can be accessed visually via intellisence in Visual Studio.NET 2008 or newer, a nice addition for those of us who are not as strong on JavaScript as we would like to be. You will definitely want to download and take a look at what MVC has to offer, you can read more at http://www.asp.net/mvc