For a while now, developers have been able to test drive the latest Visual Studio as part of the Visual Studio 2013 Preview. Like any good preview, Microsoft has been constantly improving it as developers give them feedback, including some enhancements to ASP.NET.
Microsoft recently announced that it was bringing a number of ASP.NET and Web Tools enhancements to its Visual Studio 2013 Preview. The enhancements include a new UI, new authentications and updates for MVC 5 and SignalR.
To start off, Microsoft notes that it’s added a “simple UI for creating projects that offer support for multiple ASP.NET frameworks.” Developers will be able to use different authentication configurations, including individual user accounts, organizational accounts and Windows authentication. They note that all configurations work the same across all ASP.NET frameworks.
Speaking of authentication, ASP.NET authentication is now based on the OWIN middleware. It’s part of what Microsoft calls Project Katana – an effort on the part of Microsoft to make ASP.NET more flexible to the meet the demands of the open Web. In the latest update, Project Katana added “an HttpListener-based sever, a self-host API and OwinHost executable for running OWIN applications without having to create a custom host.”
Microsoft also notes that ASP.NET now supports claims-based authentication. This type of authentication allows developers to “authorize requests from client applications to your Web APIs using OAuth2 2.0 bearer tokens.”
On a final note, Microsoft has updated ASP.NET MVC 5, Web API 2, Scaffolding and SignalR. There’s nothing all that notable from these updates except for a small change that sees MVC projects being standard Web applications now instead of using their own custom project GUID.
If you want to check out the new Visual Studio 2013 Preview alongside the enhancements being made to ASP.NET, you can grab the install here.