Beginning ASP.NET for Visual Studio 2015

William Penberthy

• Publisher: Wrox
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119077237
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Programming Languages
• Index: Computer Science

The complete guide to the productivity and performance enhancements in ASP.NET

Beginning ASP.NET for Visual Studio 2015 is your ultimate guide to the latest upgrade of this historically popular framework. Fully updated to align with the vNext release, this new edition walks you through the new tools and features that make your workflow smoother and your applications stronger. You'll get up to speed on the productivity and performance improvements, and learn how Microsoft has committed itself to more continuous innovation by increasing its release cadence for all products and services going forward. Coverage includes Async-aware debugging, ADO.NET idle connection resiliency, managed return value inspection, ASP.NET app suspension, on-demand large object heap compaction, multi-core JIT and more.

The news of an off-cycle update to ASP.NET came as a surprise, but its announcement garnered cheers at the 2014 Microsoft BUILD conference. This guide shows you what all the fuss is about, and how Microsoft overhauled the latest ASP.NET release.

• Get acquainted with the new developer productivity features
• Master the new tools that build better applications
• Discover what's new in Windows Store app development
• Learn how Microsoft fixed the issues that kept you from v5

Over 38 million websites are currently using ASP.NET, and the new upgrade is already leading to increased adoption. Programmers need to master v6 to remain relevant as web development moves forward. Beginning ASP.NET for Visual Studio 2015 walks you through the details, and shows you what you need to know so you can get up and running quickly.

Chapter 1
Getting Started with ASP.NET 6.0

What you will learn in this chapter:

• A brief history of ASP.NET and why it supports both Web Forms and MVC
• About the two frameworks, Web Forms and MVC
• How to install and use Visual Studio 2015
• The sample application that will be used throughout this book

Code Downloads for this Chapter:

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/go/beginningaspnetforvisualstudio on the Download Code tab. The code is in the chapter 01 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

The Internet has become a critical part of life to millions of people across the world. This growth in the use of the Internet has been accelerating since the 1990s and will continue as technology and access becomes more affordable. The Internet has become the go-to source for shopping, leisure, learning, and communications. It has helped to both build new businesses and give revolutionaries the capability to spread their message to the rest of the world.

This growth means that there will be a long-term demand for people with the skills to build and maintain the next generation of web applications. As an increasing percentage of the world's business is accomplished with web applications, learning how to work on these applications is an obvious career move.

An Introduction to ASP.NET vNext

The Internet started off as a set of sealed, private networks designed to share information between research institutions across the United States. The primary users of this system were the research scientists in those labs. However, as the usefulness and flexibility of this information-sharing approach became obvious, interest grew exponentially. More and more institutions became involved, resulting in the evolution of standards and protocols to support the sharing of additional types of information. The initial networks quickly expanded as commercial entities became involved. Soon, Internet service providers were available, enabling regular, everyday people to access and share the burgeoning content of the Internet.

In the early days of the Internet, most content was created and stored statically. Each HTTP request would be for a specific page or piece of stored content, and the response would simply provide that content. Early application frameworks changed that model, enabling the dynamic generation of content based on a certain set of criteria sent as part of that request. This enabled content to be built from databases and other sources, exponentially increasing the usefulness of the Web. It was at this point that the general public, rather than only scientists, really started to take advantage of the Internet's enhanced usability.

ASP.NET is one of those early web application frameworks, with the first version of the .NET Framework released in 2002. The ASP part of the name stands for “Active Server Pages,” which was Microsoft's initial web application framework that used server-side processing to create browser-readable HTML pages. The original ASP, now called “Classic ASP,” allowed the developer to use VBScript to add scripting code to HTML. However, the code and the HTML were all intermingled together in a single file.

ASP.NET was considered a major enhancement at the time because it allowed for a much cleaner separation of the code-behind, the code that handles the processing and markup, the code handling the building of the display, than any of the other frameworks available at that time. There have been improvements to this initial ASP.NET framework with every new release of the .NET Framework.

In 2008 Microsoft introduced a new framework that supported a different approach to content creation and navigation: ASP.NET MVC. MVC stands for Model View Controller, and references a software design pattern that provides a more complete separation between the user interface and the processing code. The original framework became known as Web Forms. Even as the Internet content-creation technologies evolve, the way that the Internet runs stays surprisingly unchanged. The movement of the information from the server to the client follows a very simple protocol that has barely changed since the beginning of the Internet.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the application protocol that acts as the foundation for communications within the Internet. It defines the interaction between the client machine and the server as following a request-response model whereby the client machine requests, or asks for, a specific resource and the server responds with, or sends a reply about, the information as appropriate.

This request can be very simple, from “show me this picture,” to something very complex, such as a transfer between your bank accounts. Figure 1.1 shows the outcome of that request—whether it is displaying the picture for the first, simple request or whether it is displaying the receipt for the bank transfer from the second, more complex request.

Figure 1.1 Request response

The HTTP protocol also defines what the requests and responses should look like. It includes methods, also known as verbs, which describe what kind of action should be taken on the item being requested. These verbs are not really used that much in ASP.NET Web Forms, but they are especially important in ASP.NET MVC because MVC uses these methods to identify the actions being taken on the requested object. The major verbs are listed in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1 Most Frequently Used HTTP Verbs

Name	Description
GET	A GET is a request for a resource. It should retrieve that resource without any other effect resulting from taking that action. You sh...