TechBubbles Microsoft Technology BLOG

Visual Studio 2013 and ASP.NET Preview

Visual Studio 2013 preview was announced in TechEd 2013 by Brain Harry. This post outlines the new features in Visual Studio 2013 preview project templates, Scaffolding update and Web tooling features. When you create a new project in Visual Studio 2013 then you can see only one entry under web category in new project dialog box.

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You can still see a Portable Class Library entry but that will go away in released version. Select ASP.NET Web Application and click ok then you will be prompted to select the template

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select a web forms template and say create project. Ctrl + F5 to view the new stuff!

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ASP.NET now using Bootstrap. Bootstrap is a CSS layout and theming framework that originally developed by Twitter Bootstrap. This was used by default in all ASP.NET templates. In previous release you need to do a lot of custom CSS work to build your own theme. Bootstrap is a common foundation for theme development and it is being used in web development platforms as a best practice. It is extremely easy to manipulate the layout of the page. You can get the free Bootstrap themes from here.

Download the theme from the mentioned site and create new CSS file under contents and paste the content into the file

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One Scaffolding system for MVC, Web API and Web Forms

Now it is easy to add a Scaffolding in Web Forms and moreover it is unified for all templates. First add a model class in WebForms project and then right click on the project and say Add and then select Scaffold

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say Add and remaining steps are same as in earlier version

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You can notice it will add the Default, Delete , Edit and insert pages to the project

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Now run the application then you will see person entry form as follows

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Scaffolding in Web forms uses the Dynamic Data , Entity Templates and  Field Templates.

Web Tooling updates

You would not see Visual Web Development Server in VS 2013 and it is dead. IIS Express is much faster and you see the below two options as host

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You can still use IIS or IIS Express to host your applications. Perhaps you want to use a custom server assume you are running Web API as self-host. Use external host option when you want to self-host on a custom server and not on IIS.

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Now you will see a new icon Browserlink in Visual Studio 2013. Browser link is directly connected to the browser, for example if you change the content in your web page and hit this browser link icon then your browser will get refreshed with the changes. how cool it is! It is a live connection between  a browser and Visual Studio editor. Assume you are doing a cross browser testing, the browser link connects to the as many browsers as you opened with your web url.

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Note: MVC5, Signal R 2 and Web API 2 requires .NET FW 4.5. They would not run on .NET FW 4.

Katana and OWIN for ASP.NET

Katana is not a revolutionary new project in ASP.NET world. It is just a next step in ASP.NET, The points that drive to go for Katana and OWIN are, Basically ASP.NET was optimised for two types of customers one classing ASP developers and second one LOB(line of business app) developers. From the beginning it was expected to run these applications under IIS(internet information services). More on this topic can be read here.

About the author

Kalyan Bandarupalli

My name is kalyan, I am a software architect and builds the applications using Microsoft .NET technologies. Here I am trying to share what I feel and what I think with whoever comes along wandering to Internet home of mine.I hope that this page and its contents will speak for me and that is the reason I am not going to say anything specially about my self here.

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