Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC Supports ASP.NET vNext RC

Only days after the formal announcement from Microsoft at Connect(), I am proud to inform you that our Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC product already supports the release candidate of the next major version of the .NET framework (ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6, respectively). This makes us the first major UI component vendor to officially integrate in the .NET 5 ecosystem. That means you can already plug our components in projects built with the new version of .NET, and leverage the new features it provides. Here you can find the up-to-date NuGet feed for Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC (RC1) targeting .NET 5, MVC 6 and VS 2015.

This version of Microsoft ASP.NET is a major move from a closed-source framework supported and developed by a single vendor to an open-source web framework accepting contributions. It's also a shift from the ability to create Windows-only web apps to cross-platform development on Windows, Mac and Linux.

This means a lot to every .NET developer who was confined to the MS Windows world—until now. In a nutshell, here’s what ASP.NET 5 and MVC 6 mean to you as a web developer:

•  You can now build cross-platform web applications for Windows, Mac and Linux OS utilizing the .NET Core Cross-Platform CLR for this purpose (optimized for cloud deployment as well). Telerik UI for ASP.NET MVC already supports .NET Core CLR, and you can start creating web apps with it that target any of these operating systems.
•  You can also utilize new features available in ASP.NET MVC 6 with our UI for ASP.NET MVC product. These include view components, unified MVC, Web API and Entity Framework integrations as well as increased cross-platform productivity with Visual Studio Code, easy package and task management with Bower, NuGet, Grunt, and so on.
•  Host apps in IIS or self-host in your own processes. Also for the first time you can host different .NET framework versions side-by-side.
•  Simplified dependency management and integrated dependency injection.
•  Make use of the Visual Studio 2015 integration.
•  Legacy apps will continue to work with the full .NET 5 CLR (default for backwards compatibility), so you don’t have to worry about whether they’ll remain operational with the new .NET runtime.

Also have in mind that there’s already full-featured free version of Visual Studio (Community Edition) for students and small dev shops.

And there’s more!

To get started easily with the new major version of .NET and our MVC product, we exposed the following resources for you:

•  UI for ASP.NET MVC 6 offline demos package—a github repo hosting the offline version of the product examples built against the latest ASP.NET vNext RC1. You can also find instructions how to use the product in ASP.NET MVC 6 apps in our official docs.
•  UI for ASP.NET MVC 6 sample app—another github repository containing a simple responsive app compatible with ASP.NET vNext RC1 (updated from a previous sample). Since it is powered by the .NET Core runtime, the app is cross-platform and can be deployed on Linux and Mac OSX (see video below):
  

  
  
  
  (note that you can use either ‘dnu restore’ & ‘dnx web’ commands, or a Docker container to run .NET apps on Linux and Mac OSX)

Instructions how to install and configure ASP.NET 5 on Linux and Mac to run .NET apps on these operating systems can be found in the official ASP.NET 5 docs:

Installing ASP.NET 5 on Linux
Installing ASP.NET 5 on Mac OSX

You can also check our official MVC6 page for more details.

We are eager to hear what you think about the new ASP.NET, its features and the future of the .NET development. Furthermore, feel free to share how you will use our products in ASP.NET 5 projects to create astounding web experiences. Sound off in the comments section below!