Announcing Availability of ASP.NET 5 beta 6

It feels like we just did this… we just announced an ASP.NET release, and here comes another one.  The development team has been hard at work right through the release of Visual Studio 2015 to deliver an updated set of packages and tools for you to use with ASP.NET 5.  This release, labeled ASP.NET 5 beta 6 contains a handful of new features in the framework and packages.  Let’s take a look at how we can get started adding ASP.NET 5 Beta 6 to our Visual Studio 2015 install.

Installation

For the first time in the ASP.NET 5 beta cycle, we are publishing a new version of the Visual Studio web development tools with the updated framework.  Previously, Visual Studio users would need to go through some significant changes in order to attempt to use the latest beta versions of ASP.NET 5 with their editors.  Starting with this version, you can go to the download center and get directions on how to update Visual Studio and any other editor you may be using.

Framework Updates

There are a number of changes and updates to how you can interact with the ASP.NET framework.  None of these changes are breaking, and add significant functionality that you can use.

SQL Server Distributed Cache

The new Microsoft.Framework.Caching.SqlServer package will allow you to use SQL Server as your cache store in ASP.NET 5 applications.  This enhancement allows you to cache your data when running ASP.NET in a web-farm scenario and the in-memory cache is no longer appropriate.  You can configure your SQL Server Cache with the following steps in your project folder:

1. Run dnu commands install Microsoft.Framework.Caching.SqlConfig to add a sqlservercache command to your workstation in the %userprofile%\.dnx\bin folder.
2. Run sqlservercache create to configure the cache on the database server
3. Add a reference in your project to the Microsoft.Framework.Caching.SqlServer package
4. Register the cache with the ASP.NET dependency injection in the ConfigureServices method:

5. Add parameters to your objects where you would like an IDistributedCache injected.

You can read the official announcement about this library on the ASP.NET Announcement Repository.

Strong name support for assemblies

You can now mark assemblies in your build process for strong naming.  The project.json file now has configuration options that can be set at various levels in the file for individual build configurations or framework version.  Define the strong naming properties with a compilationOptions element that looks like:

"compilationOptions": {

 "strongName": true,
 "delaySign": true,
 "keyFile": "MySecretKeyFile.snk"

 }

Place this section on the root of your project.json file to force all project configurations and frameworks to strong-name or you can place it inside an individual configuration element or framework element.  For example, to force strong-naming for release configurations, I can have this configuration section in my project.json file:

Trailing Slash support

A feature from previous MVC framework versions that had not made it over the MVC 6 yet is the ability to configure routes to append a trailing slash.  In MVC 6 this is a configuration option on the Microsoft.AspNet.Routing.RouteOptions class.  To enable this feature, simply register an instance of the RouteOptions with the service locator in the ConfigureServices method in the Startup class:

 services.AddInstance(new RouteOptions()
 {
 AppendTrailingSlash = true,
 });

Response Buffering and Caching

With ASP.NET 5 running on Windows with the IIS web server, it is important that we use all of the resources available to us in order to deliver great performance.  Starting with this beta, kernel mode caching is enabled for all requests on IIS.  No configuration changes are needed to enable this performance boost.  None.  Nada.  You get more performance for free, and that’s a good thing.

MVC and WebAPI Packages – Less is Better!

We know that a lot of ASP.NET developers are enjoying the MVC 6 implementation with WebAPI.  It was a natural match that works really well together and has delivered some great experiences from the early feedback we are hearing.  We have also heard from some developers who really like WebAPI and don’t want to have their application waste time loading other resources that WebAPI doesn’t use like Razor or TagHelpers.

Starting with beta 6, you can now consume a smaller subset of the MVC packages to allow you to work with WebAPI functionality and exclude other dependencies that you don’t need for your implementation.  Typically when you work with MVC 6, you only need to include one package: Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc and you get all of the references you need through transient dependencies.  You may also call this feature “indirect package references”, as this feature of the package manager allows all of the dependent packages that make up MVC and WebAPI to be included in your project with no extra code or configuration.

The update in this beta 6 version allows you to specify a subset of those indirect package references.  In the scenario described above, where a WebAPI developer doesn’t want all of the Razor and TagHelper features, they can use a project.json configuration file with this subset of dependencies to deliver a WebAPI-only application:

Summary

This is an incremental release of the ASP.NET 5 frameworks and we hope that you download a copy of the ASP.NET 5 tools and framework and try it out.  We have a long road still ahead of us, and we hope you follow our ASP.NET 5 roadmap and provide feedback on the features you like and don’t like.  You can start by replying to this post and telling us what you think of these new features that were added.  After that, stop by the next ASP.NET Community Standup on Tuesday and you can ask the ASP.NET 5 Program Managers any follow-up questions you may have.