"Top 10 Changes in ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6" [The post that has the WebForm/VB'ers in an uproar...]

Stephen Walther - Top 10 Changes in ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6

I spent the last couple of weeks writing sample code for ASP.NET 5/MVC 6 and I was surprised by the depth of the changes in the current beta release of ASP.NET 5. ASP.NET 5 is the most significant new release of ASP.NET in the history of the ASP.NET framework — it has been rewritten from the ground up.

In this blog post, I list what I consider to be the top 10 most significant changes in ASP.NET 5. This is a highly opinionated list. If other changes strike you as more significant, please describe the change in a comment.

1. ASP.NET on OSX and Linux

2. No More Web Forms [GD: Click through and read the comment & comment]

3. No More Visual Basic [GD: Lots of comments about this. Click through for support links, comment & comment)

4. Tag Helpers

5. View Components

6. GruntJS, NPM, and Bower Support

7. Unified MVC and Web API Controllers

8. AngularJS

9. ASP.NET Dependency Injection Framework

10. xUnit.net

..."

WebForms is not going away, not any more than WPF is. It IS going to live in the 4.6 line though.

What about Web Forms?

You can continue developing Web Forms apps and have confidence that Web Forms is an essential part of the .NET web development platform. We remain focused on adding new features to Web Forms to improve the development experience and keep the technology up-to-date with web practices.

Web Forms 4.6 includes the following new features for Web Forms:

• HTTP 2
• Async model binding
• Roslyn CodeDOM compilers

Your existing Web Forms apps will continue to run without modification on IIS with .NET 4.6. You can’t use Web Forms apps with the cloud-optimized runtime.

For a video about the new features in Web Forms 4.6, see Web Forms 4.6. For information about the many recent changes for Web Forms in Visual Studio 2013 Update 2, see Improvements to ASP.NET Web Forms.

VB? Again VB "IS NOT DEAD" but for ASP.NET v5 it won't be in the RTM.

Visual Basic Support? #236

paullyvenne commented on Dec 14 2014

I was interested in trying out vNext with VB.NET? It seems to be promoted on most of the news but I don't see anything but C#. What's the latest news?

matthewhancock commented on Dec 15 2014

Yeah, it's a little frustrating re-installing the latest versions of Visual Studio 2015 hoping VB will have vNext templates with no luck.

coolcsh commented on Dec 15 2014

ASP.NET 5 is C# only at this point and that will not change before we RTM. We plan to have extensibility points so other languages like VB, F#, etc can be added via the form of a support package or such.

Guys look, ASP.NET v5 is a complete, from the ground-up rewrite. It's a v1, but built by those that have decades of experience and have learned the many hard lessons that entails ad built for today's web, not the web of the late 99's...

Don't take it from me, check out today's Scott Gu post;

Introducing ASP.NET 5

The first preview release of ASP.NET 1.0 came out almost 15 years ago.  Since then millions of developers have used it to build and run great web applications, and over the years we have added and evolved many, many capabilities to it. 

I'm excited today to post about a new release of ASP.NET that we are working on that we are calling ASP.NET 5.  This new release is one of the most significant architectural updates we've done to ASP.NET.  As part of this release we are making ASP.NET leaner, more modular, cross-platform, and cloud optimized.  The ASP.NET 5 preview is now available as a preview release, and you can start using it today by downloading the latest CTP of Visual Studio 2015 which we just made available.

ASP.NET 5 is an open source web framework for building modern web applications that can be developed and run on Windows, Linux and the Mac. It includes the MVC 6 framework, which now combines the features of MVC and Web API into a single web programming framework.  ASP.NET 5 will also be the basis for SignalR 3 - enabling you to add real time functionality to cloud connected applications. ASP.NET 5 is built on the .NET Core runtime, but it can also be run on the full .NET Framework for maximum compatibility.

With ASP.NET 5 we are making a number of architectural changes that makes the core web framework much leaner (it no longer requires System.Web.dll) and more modular (almost all features are now implemented as NuGet modules - allowing you to optimize your app to have just what you need).  With ASP.NET 5 you gain the following foundational improvements:

• Build and run cross-platform ASP.NET apps on Windows, Mac and Linux
• Built on .NET Core, which supports true side-by-side app versioning
• New tooling that simplifies modern Web development
• Single aligned web stack for Web UI and Web APIs
• Cloud-ready environment-based configuration
• Integrated support for creating and using NuGet packages
• Built-in support for dependency injection
• Ability to host on IIS or self-host in your own process

The end result is an ASP.NET that you'll feel very familiar with, and which is also now even more tuned for modern web development.