As part of the recent launched Visual Studio 2015 CTP6 new ASP.NET features are ready for developers to sample. Microsoft’s Jeffrey T. Fritz announced the details of this release, noting that these features should benefit a wide variety of tasks.
The first thing that will be noticeable to developers starting a new project is the appearance of new project templates, categorized into ASP.NET 4.6 and ASP.NET 5 Preview. For this latter group, 3 templates are available, an Empty template, Starter Web template, and the Web API template.
The Task Runner Explorer window has been changed, with some new toolbar icons to allow for refreshing the current file, toggle verbosity of the current task, and to toggle the Force flag when running a task.
The ability to add references to system assemblies has been included, with the ability to do the same for user assemblies coming in a future release.
A project properties page has been created and can be used to set the options in the project.json file without having to resort to editing the json file directly. Coinciding with this is support for the configuration files used with Grunt, Bower, npm, and Gulp.
Something to note is that the command-line options for the K Package Manager (KPM) have been changed including redefinitions for the pack and build commands. The following table lists the changes:
Old Name New Name Description pack bundle Bundle application for deployment build pack Build NuGet packages for the project in a given directory - build Build assemblies for the project - packages Manage local and remote packages folders - list Print the dependencies of a given project
