News
ASP.NET, Web Tools Get an Update
Numerous packages get a refresh with the Visual Studio 2013 Preview.
Along with the new release of Visual Studio 2013 preview comes new tooling and a new version of ASP.NET, Microsoft's framework for building Web sites and Web applications.
The updates amount to more of a refresh of ASP.NET and Web Tools, rather than a major upgrade. The tools are bundled into VS 2013 preview, so there's no need to download them separately for those running the preview.
One of the more obvious upgrades is to the main ASP.NET UI. Called "One ASP.NET," the interface offers a number of templates under one umbrella, including Web Forms, MVC (model-view-controller), Web API, SPA, Facebook and mobile. The release notes for the upgrade state that One ASP.NET takes a "step towards unifying our set of experiences so that you should be able to achieve the same set of functionality no matter how you started building your ASP.NET application."
Other updated or new tools include:
- ASP.NET Identity, a set of tools for authentication in ASP.NET applications.
- ASP.NET Web Forms, a foundational technology for building drag-and-drop sites.
- ASP.NET MVC 5, which uses patterns-based methods to separation business, input and UI logic.
- ASP.NET Web API 2, for building HTTP services and RESTful applications.
- Scaffolding, a new code generation framework for MVC, Web Forms and Web API projects.
- Entity Framework, with a beta of version 6.0.
- ASP.NET SignalR 2.0 beta 2, which includes support for Xamarin's MonoTouch and MonoDroid cross-platform tools, and a portable .NET Client Library.
The preview released today is not officially supported by Microsoft, so developers should take that into account before installing in production environments.
About the Author
Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.