ASP.NET 5 : Introduction

In my last post we saw how exactly we can deploy the web application in Azure using Visual Studio. Today we will see the new major changes in ASP.NET 5. 

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. 

First major changes is related to the project system. Projects in ASP.NET 5 are now based on File System. So if you need to add any new file or directory in the project then all you need to do is to place it in the proper file system and it will automatically get added in the project. So user can now edit the source code, save the file and build will happen dynamically.

Another new changes in ASP.NET 5 is the unification of ASP.NET MVC + WEB API. In MVC 6, Web API is merged with MVC, it means we will now have one set of controller class, one set of attributes, model binders etc. Even with these new changes, all our old projects will still work fine is Visual Studio 2015. Now lets go for some demo, since I have a MSDN Subscription I have already downloaded the Visual Studio 2015 RC version. You can download it from here. Lets create the project as shown below :

After you select "ASP.NET Web Application" and click OK, you will get a new window asking to select the template as shown below:

And once you select Web Site and click ok, new ASP.NET 5 project will be created. And when I will run the project I will get the below output.

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