The world of Web development is changing rapidly. To keep up, Microsoft has been making incremental changes to ASP.NET. The latest update to the framework brings changes and additions to every member of the ASP.NET family.
Micrososft recently released ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 to the general coding public. The release contains new templates and tooling ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API and the rest of the ASP.NET family. Microsoft put together a little video to go over what’s in the latest release:
If you don’t like watching informative videos, here’s a quick rundown of the new features in this latest release. First, Web Forms got a a new FriendlyURL package that adds the following benefits:
It automatically maps URLs to ASPX pages
It automatically passes route values to controls with a nice bindable syntax
The ASP.NET Web API gets the following three new features:
Automatic Help Page generation.
Tracing – Everything in the pipeline is output to the System.Diagnostics.Trace, so you can read it in the Visual Studio output window as well as any registered Trace Listener.
OData – Lots of new stuff here, including routing and query validation
ASP.NET MVC gets a few new templates and the following three features:
The Facebook template makes it easy to create full Facebook apps. Your users log in on Facebook, approve your requests to access their Facebook content, and then your app can interact with their social graph.
There’s a lightweight Single Page Application template based on Knockout.js and ASP.NET Web API.
We’ve made it possible to create new ASP.NET MVC templates using a Visual Studio extension (VSIX). Expect to see a lot more templates from us and others in the community!
As for Web Tools, here’s some of the highlights that you’ll see in practice in the above video:
Page Inspector now has live sync, so when you update CSS you’ll see it update immediately.
There’s IntelliSense support for Knockout bindings, CoffeeScript, and more.
The integrated publishing includes single file publish and compare. That means that you can edit a single file and push it out, or even compare your local changes against the live production version.
You can grab this latest release of ASP.NET and any future release over at the official Web site.