Introducing New Features of Visual Studio 2013 RC: Part 2

Introduction

As you know, Microsoft has released the latest version of Visual Studio 2013, in other words Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate (RC) in the past week. In this article I am introducing the new features of the RC version. I have already described some of them in my previous article. If you are using the previous version already, in other words Visual Studio 2013 Preview, then you are already familiar with some of these new features.

So, let's have a look at the other new features released with Visual Studio 2013 RC:

• Enhancement of Web Editor
• Web Publish
• ASP.NET Web API 2
• ASP.NET Identity
• Entity Framework 6
• OWIN

You need to install Visual Studio 2013 RC from here to use these features. I am describing the features briefly.

Enhancement of Web Editor

There are various enhancements done by Microsoft in the Visual Studio 2013. The new HTML editor is available for Razor files and HTML files in web applications. The consolidated schema of HTML 5 is used by the HTML Editor. You can get the benefit of automatic brace completion, grouping in IntelliSense, UI of jQuery and so on.

Web Publish

There are new enhancements with Web Publishing in this new release. With web publishing you can publish your selected files or web config file using FTP also. You can do it by Web Deployment.  

ASP.NET Web API 2

You can now use Attribute Routing in the ASP.NET Web API 2. The Attribute Routing helps you to control over the URIs in your web API. You can elaborate the resource hierarchy using a single API controller. There is a big contribution of Tim McCall to create a support for routing. You can also specify your Web API routes by annotating your controller.

ASP.NET Identity

There are mainly three types of identities available:

• New ASP.NET Membership
  
  The New ASP.NET Membership is the identity for ASP.NET Web Applications. You can blend your specific data to the application data. Using the persistence model you can integrate data. You can also get the benefit of storing your data in the SQL Server database and another data stores of NoSql like Windows Azure Store.
   
• Claim-based Authentication
  
  Using claim-based authentication, users are authenticated by their user names and passwords credentials. The identity of any user is treated as a set of claims from a trusted issuer. You can use social network identities like Facebook, Twitter or any organizational accounts like Windows Azure Active directory to authenticate.
   
• Blend with WAAD and WSAD
  
  To authenticate your ASP.NET Web Application, you can also use Windows Azure Active Directory and Windows Server Active Directory credentials.   

Entity Framework 6

The latest version of Entity Framework 6 was released with Visual Studio 2013. The following are some of the features of EF 6 Release Candidate:

• Connection Resiliency
  
  You can now create your own retry policies. The automatic connection failure problem is solved with this version of Entity Framework.
   
• Code Based Configuration
  
  Now you can configure your code in a config file. It gives functionality to perform code in the configuration.
   
• SQL logging
  
  It provides low-level building blocks for interception of Entity Framework operations with simple SQL logging built on top.
   
• Improved Testability
  
  The improvement in testability makes it easier to create test for a DbContext class and a DbSet class in an Entity Framework assembly.

OWIN

Open Web Interface (OWIN) is used to create a decoupled architecture between a Web Server and Web Applications or you can say it defines an abstraction between .NET web servers and .NET web applications. Now using this you can host your web application in Internet Information Services (IIS). You can get more information about OWIN and KATANA from here.

Summary

In the preceding article I described the latest features of Visual Studio 2013 Release Candidate. You can also have a look in my previous article for the other features of this latest version.

Thanks for reading. 

Further Readings

Continue to Part 1: Introduction of New Features of Visual Studio 2013 RC: Part 1 >>