Well, this is something we had been waiting on for a while, RC was promised for January 2009, and as someone mentioned a few days back on Twitter, the team were cutting it awfully close. But, they managed it - the ASP.NET MVC team is one of those rare and very welcome things in the software world - a team that constantly meets it's promises, and constantly exceeds expectations. Scott Guthrie has a full detailed list of the release candidate changes - and some of them are very welcome indeed. For a briefer run through Phil Haack has provided a more conscise list. 

You can download it directly here, or read more on the MVC site.

Unfortunately a small problem has also surfaced in the new placeholder they put in the head section of the master template, but I have no doubt that this along with any remaining niggles that come to light, will be resolved in double time.

Apart from letting you know that the RC is out, and I'm sure you already know this by now, the other point of this post is to do something we are accused of failing to do all too often - congratulate the ASP.NET MVC team on constantly being the shining example of how to create a quality product, in full cooperation with the development community at large, and constantly bringing far more to the table than was promised. This ethos is starting to become evident in other small teams scattered around MS, and very welcome it is too, long may it continue to spread - instead of feeling I have to fight badly designed frameworks every day, I can now say I actually enjoying working in them.