Recap of the Telerik ASP.NET 5 Webinar

ASP.NET 5 is around the corner. Yes, it is a major re-write and has lots of changes. But that does not mean web developers on Microsoft stack need to be worried. In fact, it's one of the best times to be an ASP.NET developer. ASP.NET 5 is now a modern lean, modular and cross-platform web development framework that works with your choice of OS and IDE/Editors. Good times ahead!

Relive the Content

On Oct 28, Telerik developer advocates Sam Basu, Ed Charbeneau and Michael Crump unpacked all things new and shiny in ASP.NET 5 during the Telerik ASP.NET Webinar. We had a huge audience who asked a LOT of questions—understandable given how big an impact ASP.NET has on developers. If you couldn't make it for the live webinar, you can relive the webinar in its entirety—high definition recording available now!

Prize Winners

What’s a Telerik webinar without some awesome prizes? As they're some of the hottest gadgets around, we picked an Xbox One and a GoPro Camera—developers gotta have fun, right?

We picked two random winners (tentative until accepted) among webinar attendees—you win just for showing up!

Xbox One—Frank Morales
GoPro Camera—Laura Ye

Congrats winners. Hope you enjoy your prizes!

Additional Question/Answers

One of the most enjoyable aspects of the webinars for us advocates is the Q/A at the end. We appreciate developers bringing up real-world questions and concerns on the latest technologies. And ASP.NET 5 is just a hot topic that invites a ton of questions.

While we tried to answer as many questions as we could on air, there were just way too many to cover. Here is some additional Q/A, expanding on what we covered about ASP.NET as well as the Telerik ASP.NET UI suites.

Q: How do you set up the Telerik private NuGet feed?
A: There is actually nothing to set up. Telerik is already hosting the NuGet bits to include UI for ASP.NET MVC controls into your applications. In Visual Studio, go to Options and NuGet Package Manager and simply add https://nuget.telerik.com/nuget as a Package Source. This will prompt you for your Telerik account credentials first time and once authenticated, gives you access the Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC bits.

Q: What did you do to set up C# intellisense inside of Sublime Text when building ASP.NET applications?
A: Simply get the Kulture and OmniSharp packages for Sublime Text. Details @ http://www.omnisharp.net/.

Q: Can a Visual Studio ASP.NET project created on Windows be moved to OSX and run using the same setup process?
A: Although the scaffolded project structure of an ASP.NET 5 project on Windows is similar to what you’ll get in OSX/Linux, the runtimes are very different. The DNX runtime is hosted by either IIS or Kestrel for cross-platform compatibility and as such, an ASP.NET application needs to be built on the platform on which they are intended to run. There are detailed steps to set up ASP.NET on OSX and Linux, and project configuration continues to be very similar between systems.

Q: Are there easy migration paths for existing ASP.NET applications to MVC 6?
A: MVC 6 is a big re-write and migration paths will not be simple, in part, because of changed runtimes and API canvas availability. Please hold tight until ASP.NET 5 is released for the migration story to take shape. There will be guidance from Microsoft and the developer community.

Q: Is it possible to replace Bower with NuGet to manage front-end packages?
A: If the desired front-end packages exist in NuGet, by all means, you can use them instead of Bower. NuGet still plays a huge, in fact, a larger role in ASP.NET 5. Bower just gives developers additional options they didn't have before through Visual Studio alone.

Q: Can we define our own Tag Helpers in MVC 6?
A: Yes, creating your own Tag Helpers is easier than writing custom HtmlHelpers from the past.

Q: Now that configuration is done in .JSON rather than .XML, how do we add comments to our configurations?
A: At this time, there does not appear to be a way to add comments within the actual .JSON file itself.

Q: Would the config.json files allow different connection strings for various development/production environments?
A: Yes, you would use config.development.json and config.production.json to allow for different connection strings.

Q: Can you swap out the IOC container in MVC 6 with something like Autofac?
A: Absolutely, we covered this in detail on the Telerik Developer Network.

Q: Will Visual Studio automatically convert Web.config to the new Project.json on solution upgrade?
A: Keep in mind, these files serve slightly different purposes, and as such, we do not know of an automatic conversion strategy. So, there may be some manual mapping to move over configurations and dependencies—look for the migration strategy to take shape as ASP.NET 5 is released next year.

Q: What would be the status of the Telerik UI suites moving into ASP.NET 5?
A: We’re very excited about ASP.NET 5 and your beloved Telerik UI suites will be ready when vNext of ASP.NET finally ships. In fact, we’re as ready as it can get right now. Both Telerik UI for ASP.NET Ajax and UI for ASP.NET MVC have existing support for Visual Studio 2015. The WebForms suite will be fully supported on top of .NET Framework 4.6. The MVC suite is already boasting support for ASP.NET 5 Beta 7 of MVC 6. We’re working closely with Microsoft on the cross-platform story and to utilize framework enhancements to offer the best possible ASP.NET tooling for developers.

Resources

Webinar Recording - https://youtu.be/EnfyJKSZvMU
Sam’s Deck - http://1drv.ms/1hQArOp
Ed’s Deck - http://1drv.ms/1KL49LS

That’s a Wrap

This may be one of the best times to be a ASP.NET developer. Yes, there could be some hesitancy with all of the changes that ASP.NET 5 is bringing to the table. But this was a much needed overhaul to make ASP.NET 5 a modern, lean, modular and more importantly, cross-platform web development framework. So go ahead and start dreaming up your next web application in ASP.NET 5—Telerik DevCraft tooling is right alongside to help you. Adios and have fun coding!