At its TechEd North America 2014 conference, Microsoft did multiple announcements regarding various developer tools and technologies. Among other annouvements, Microsoft previews ASP.NET vNext for the first time.
ASP.NET vNext is a lean and composable framework for building web and cloud applications. ASP.NET vNext is fully open source and available on GitHub. ASP.NET vNext is currently in preview.
Here are some of the features of ASP.NET vNext:
- ASP.NET vNext is a streamlined framework and runtime that is optimized for server and cloud-based apps.
- It allows ASP.NET developers leverage their existing skills and create applications with automatic built in support for cloud.
- ASP.NET vNext includes new cloud-optimized versions of MVC, Web API, Web Pages, SignalR, and Entity Framework.
- ASP.NET vNext apps can use a cloud-optimized subset of .NET vNext. This subset is factored for server and web workloads, has a smaller footprint than the full .NET vNext, and supports side-by-side deployment.
- MVC 6 has no dependency on System.Web. The result is a leaner framework, with faster startup time and lower memory consumption.
- ASP.NET vNext will support true side-by-side deployment. If your app uses the cloud-optimized subset of .NET vNext, you can bin deploy all of your dependencies, including the .NET vNext (cloud optimized) packages. That means you can update your app without affecting other applications on the same server.
- ASP.NET vNext uses the Rosyln compiler to compile code dynamically. You will be able to edit a code file, refresh the browser, and see the changes without rebuilding the project.
- ASP.NET vNext will be part of the .NET Foundation as an open source project (including all the libraries from the lowest level all the way to UI frameworks), and will run across multiple platforms through a partnership with Xamarin.
In order to accomplish these goals, ASP.NET vNext contains breaking changes. The current frameworks (Web Forms 5, MVC 5, Web API 2, Web Pages 3, SignalR 2, and Entity Framework 6) will continue to ship in Visual Studio, and will be fully supported in .NET vNext.
To find more about ASP.NET vNext please visit http://www.asp.net/vnext/overview/aspnet-vnext/overview.
