News
Beta for ASP.NET 5 Available on NuGet
Microsoft recommends developers get ASP.NET 5 beta5 that was released earlier this week as an in-place upgrade to beta4, as it contains numerous changes to the .NET Execution Engine, ASP.NET and MVC 6.
The official unveiling of Visual Studio 2015 is a few weeks away, so expect lots of action and beta versions coming from various Microsoft groups. The group working on ASP.NET 5 just released what they're calling "beta5" of the Web application framework, with this version including some significant changes to the .NET Execution Engine, ASP.NET itself and MVC 6.
Microsoft recommends that any Visual Studio 2015 RC testers download this version, as it's an in-place version to replace the beta4 that shipped with Visual Studio 2015 RC, according to a blog post that details the release.
Within the .NET Execution Engine is support for NuGet 3 feeds and the dotnet Target Framework Moniker (TFM). Restoring packages via NuGet 3 feed support is supposed to be sped up here, while dotnet TFM support allows for use of the .NET Execution Engine "to build portable .NET libraries that work on any .NET flavor that supports your package dependencies." Developers can now specify language and release note links from inside a project.json file, as well.
Also new is a bit more flexibility working with JSON.NET versions. Rather than having to work with the specific version of JSON.NET that shipped with the .NET Execution Engine, it now works with any updated JSON.NET. This means developers no longer have to keep apprised of JSON.NET versions as the .NET Execution Engine is updated. And one more change to the .NET Execution Engine is the addition of the iRunTimeEnvironment service, for getting runtime details.
New in ASP.NET 5 is the addition of a Connection property, called HttpContext.Connection, that provides connection data to HttpContext; "new localization abstractions and middleware"; and ASP.NET hosting termination via Ctrl+C.
Finally, on MVC 6, among the changes included in this version: C# support when working with the Razor parser; the addition of app-level settings to simplify the configuration of HTML helper settings; a JSON helper for serializing .NET objects to JSON while in Razor view; ability to use route tokens in route names; addition of a new tag helper that allows for refreshing images.
ASP.NET 5 beta5 is available here; documentation and samples are here.
About the Author
You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].