3 Significants Change in ASP.NET 5

I spent the last couple of weeks writing sample code for ASP.NET 5/MVC 6 and I was surprised by the depth of the changes in the current beta release of ASP.NET 5. ASP.NET 5 is the most significant new release of ASP.NET in the history of the ASP.NET framework — it has been rewritten from the ground up.

In this blog post, I list what I consider to be the top 10 most significant changes in ASP.NET 5. This is a highly opinionated list. If other changes strike you as more significant, please describe the change in a comment.

1. ASP.NET on OSX and Linux

For the first time in the history of ASP.NET, you can run ASP.NET 5 applications on OSX and Linux. Let me repeat this. ASP.NET 5 apps can run on Windows, OSX, and Linux. This fact opens up ASP.NET to a whole new audience of developers and designers.

The traditional audience for ASP.NET is professional developers working in a corporation. Corporate customers are welded to their Windows machines.

Startups, in stark contrast, tend to use OSX/Linux. Whenever I attend a startup conference, the only machines that I see in the audience are Macbook Pros. These people are not the traditional users of ASP.NET.

Furthermore, designers and front-end developers – at least when they are outside the corporate prison – also tend to use Macbook Pros. Whenever I attend a jQuery conference, I see Macbook Pros everywhere (the following picture is from the jQuery blog).

Enabling ASP.NET 5 to run on Windows, OSX, and Linux changes everything. For the first time, all developers and designers can start building apps with ASP.NET 5. And, they can use their favorite development environments such as Sublime Text and WebStorm when working with ASP.NET apps (No Visual Studio required).

2. No More Web Forms

I love ASP.NET Web Forms. I’ve spent hundreds – if not thousands – of hours of my life building Web Forms applications. However, it is finally time to say goodbye. ASP.NET Web Forms is not part of ASP.NET 5.

You can continue to build Web Forms apps in Visual Studio 2015 by targeting the .NET 4.6 framework. However, Web Forms apps cannot take advantage of any of the cool new features of ASP.NET 5 described in this list. If you don’t want to be left behind as history marches forward then it is finally time for you to rewrite your Web Forms app into ASP.NET MVC.

3. No More Visual Basic

It is also time to say goodbye to Visual Basic. ASP.NET 5 only supports C# and Visual Basic is left behind. My hope is that this change won’t be too painful. I believe that there are only two people in the entire world who are building MVC apps in Visual Basic. It is time for both of you to stop it. There are good automatic converters for going from Visual Basic to C#.

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