Microsoft has been working on some interesting features after shipping ASP.NET 4.5. Some of these are available in the Fall 2012 Build preview. Scott Hanselman and Jon Galloway demoed a few of them, at a //build/ session "Bleeding Edge ASP.NET".
Following are some of the interesting features -
- Several enhancements to ASP.NET Web API
- Web API tracing
- Auto-generated API documentation or help page
- Ability to support OData syntax for your web APIs by just adding a “Queryable” attribute
- Several new templates such as
- Facebook app, with classes that represent Facebook users
- SPA template
- Windows Azure Authentication to authenticate Office 365 users or users in your own custom Windows Azure Active Directory Domain
- More features in WebForms similar to MVC, such as scaffolding CRUD pages for a strongly typed Model
- New features in Visual Studio Web essentials – most interesting being debugging original sources in compile-to-js languages such as TypeScript and CoffeeScript alongside the generated JavaScript
Scott also emphasized how most of these components are getting released as NuGet packages making them less opinionated, allowing quicker updates and also ability to mix and match. Another point highlighted was how NuGet was being used by the community in various ways – for example JQMobile Theme roller allows you roll your own theme and download it as a NuGet package.
You can read more about the Fall Update in Jon Galloway's article.