ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6

Posted by Filip Ekberg on 30 Jun 2015

If you are a web developer, you will most definitely be happy about the coming updates to ASP.NET and MVC. It really comes hand in hand with the re-work of CoreCLR, and the amazing work Microsoft is doing in the open-source space!

As of Today, Microsoft released the fifth beta of ASP.NET 5, which introduces a bunch of (breaking) changes.

I have been working with ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6 for a few months now, and I can honestly say that I really like what I am seeing. One thing that I really like is the fact that there's not really a differentiation between MVC and WebAPI; you have your controllers, actions and views/content returned to the consumer. Be it a View, JSON or XML, it doesn't really matter.

Out of the box, it feels like ASP.NET 5 promotes better application design. It comes with it's own dependency injection, it's more testable, configuration improved, startup pipeline is very configurable and extendable; overall it feels lightweight if you want it to be, and it could grow in to a large enterprise application if that is the purpose.

A really important aspect of ASP.NET 5, is the promise of cross-platform. I've developed, and run, an ASP.NET 5 application on OSX and it works great! Esepcially with Visual Studio Code. Unless you want to setup the project template yourself, you can use something called Yeoman (yo aspnet) to create the project template.

The ASP.NET 5 Project

When starting a completely new ASP.NET 5 Project, be it in OSX using Yeoman, or in Visual Studio 2015 you will immediately see a lot of changes compared to what you might be used to. If this is your first encounter with ASP.NET 5, I'd recommend using the template that gives you a test site, and just remove what you don't need.