Whats New in ASP.NET and Web Tools for Visual Studio 2013

Microsoft recently released the new version of Visual Studio 2013 and web tools. Here are the summary of the new features for the web developers in Visual Studio 2013.

• New release focuses on One ASP.NET, which steps toward to unifying the ASP.NET technologies so core features can and web tools work the same  across the platforms (e.g. adding ASP.NET MVC controllers to a Web Forms application).
• Enhance Authentication and Identity feature.
• New version of ASP.NET, which includes ASP.NET MVC 5, Web API 2, Razor 3, Entity Framework 6 and SignalR 2.0
• New Browser link feature that lets you to connect multiple browsers to Visual Studio and refresh them all by clicking a button in the toolbar.
• New core features include new templates based on Bootstrap, a new scaffolding system.
• Awesome editor for web tools, including HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript,  jQuery, AngularJS, Ember, LESS, CofeeScript etc.
• New Project Readme.html page.
• New and enhance Web publish features like easily automate Web.config file encryption, automate taking an application offline during deployment.
• Visual Studio 2013 released with a new NuGet 2.7 for package management.

Now I have tried to explain some of the awesome and incredible features those are introduced in Visual Studio 2013 release.

One ASP.NET

 In all of the new features I love this most. Now you don't need to take burden on deciding which tolls will you use for the web application. You just decide that, you want to create a ASP.NET to build web site and services and you could use the appropriate tools as you needed them. This feature unifying the experience of using ASP.NET technologies and you can now mix them as you want.  

One Technology: Multiple Experience

The new web project experience allows you to create a new ASP.NET Web Project then you can select the project type you want, configure any combination of technologies (Web Forms, MVC, Web API), configure authentication options, and add a unit test project.

Authentication and Identity

Now the new Create Web Project dialog includes the feature to change the default Authentication options.  when you create an ASP.NET Web Forms project you can select any of the following options:

• No Authentication 
• Individual User Accounts (ASP.NET membership or social provider log in) 
• Organisational Accounts (Active Directory in an internet application) 
• Windows Authentication (Active Directory in an intranet application)

New Bootstrap based project template

Visual Studio 2013 introduced a new Bootstrap3 based project template that is a powerful front-end framework that supports responsive and nice UI.

ASP.NET Scaffolding 

ASP.NET Scaffolding makes easy to add boilerplate code to your project that interacts with a data model. In previous versions of Visual Studio, scaffolding was limited to ASP.NET MVC projects. With Visual Studio 2013, you can now use scaffolding for any ASP.NET project, including Web Forms. Visual Studio 2013 does not currently support generating pages for a Web Forms project, but you can still use scaffolding with Web Forms by adding MVC dependencies to the project.

ASP.NET MVC 5

In Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET MVC is now well integrate with One ASP.NET experience we have already discussed. There is no separate project type for ASP.NET MVC only. ASP.NET MVC supports the common features of ASP.NET like Bootstrap templates, Scaffolding, Authentication, Identity etc. ASP.NET MVC 5 also supports some incredible features.

Attribute Routing

The most amazing feature that is new in ASP.NET MVC 5 is Attribute Routing. With attribute routing you can specify your routes by annotating your actions and controllers.

Filter enhancements 

There are two new additions to filters: 

• Authentication filters are a new kind of filter in ASP.NET MVC that run prior to authorization filters in the ASP.NET MVC pipeline and allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller, or globally for all controllers. Authentication filters process credentials in the request and provide a corresponding principal. Authentication filters can also add authentication challenges in response to unauthorised requests. 
• Override filters let you change which filters apply to a given action method or controller. Override filters specify a set of filter types that should not be run for a given scope (action or controller). This allows you to configure filters that apply globally but then exclude certain global filters from applying to specific actions or controllers.

ASP.NET Web API 2

ASP.NET Web API 2 includes a lot of new features.

Attribute Routing

ASP.NET Web API supports the same attribute routing system that's in ASP.NET MVC 5. You can read more about the Attribute Routing features in Web API in this article.

OAuth 2.0

ASP.NET Web API picks up OAuth 2.0 support, using security middleware running on OWIN. This is great for features like authenticated Single Page Applications.

OData Improvements

ASP.NET Web API now has full OData support. That required adding in some of the most powerful operators: $select, $expand, $batch and $value. You can read more about OData operator support in this article by Mike Wasson.

OWIN Integration

ASP.NET Web API now fully supports OWIN and can be run on any OWIN capable host. Also included is a HostAuthenticationFilter that provides integration with the OWIN authentication system. With OWIN integration, you can self-host Web API in your own process alongside other OWIN middleware, such as SignalR. For more information, see Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API.