Recently, Scott Guthrie announced the release of ASP.NET 5 on his blog. This release will feature the most radical changes to the popular web development framework in its 15 year history. The preview is now available for download. According to Scott, this open source framework release will focus on making it more lean, modular, and optimized for Cloud. It will also be highly portable, running with equal ease on Windows, Linux and Mac based systems. Some of the important updates to the core framework feature include the .NET Core assembly now getting deployed as part of the app allowing you to run multiple versions side by side and keeping the application independent of the framework installed on the host OS. In addition, in order to keep the framework lightweight, the components are available as NuGet packages and you can install only what your application requires.

Another interesting update for developer productivity in Visual Studio 2015 for ASP.NET 5 is the dynamic compilation feature that allows you to reflect the changes, such as values assigned to variables, at runtime and see them updated in the UI output. This will go a long way in helping developers debug without having to waste time in recompiling the entire project.

ASP.NET 5 also comes with MVC 6, which be a more unified model than previous editions by removing the redundancy across Web API, MVC and Web Forms. This will also aid in seamless transitions from one platform to another. Syntactical improvements in Razor are also a nice addition. You can now use a much more robust declarative syntax such as using asp-validation-summary?instead of @Html.ValidationSummary?in your views by virtue of extending the semantics of the tags in markup.

However, the most important addition, in my opinion, is the native support for Dependency Injection. It now provides the ActivateAttribute attribute that can be leveraged to inject services via properties not just in controllers but filters and views as well.