.NET Releases & Versions in 2015




- June 16, 2015

Rest of the Story:

In 2015 we will have new releases of .NET Framework, ASP.NET versions, Web Forms, MVC versions.  That is quite a bit to keep track of.  This should make it a little easier.  I am surprised that Microsoft has not made it more clear as to what is included in which version.  They recently starting calling this bundle .NET 2015 and as a bundle includes a number of sub-products.
So starting with the .NET 2015 Bundle….it includes .NET 4.6 AND .NET Core
.NET 4.6 and .NET Core includes..(.NET 4.6 is included with Visual Studio 2015)

  • ASP.NET 4.6  is an umbrella term used to describe updates to existing frameworks such as ASP.NET Web Forms/MVC 5/Web Api 2.

  • ASP.NET Web Forms 46

  • ASP.NET MVC 5.2.3 – updates to MVC 5 found here

  • ASP.NET Web Pages 3.2.3

  • ASP.NET Web API 5.2.3

  • ASP.NET SignalR 2.1.2

  • ASP.NET 5.0 Beta 5 (vNext)  – a .NET platform for build cloud-based apps and can be hosted on IIS or self-hosted in a custom process.  It supports running on both the .NET Framework and .NET Core so by extension supports running on Windows, Linux, OS X etc.

  • MVC 6.0 - MVC, Web API, and Web Pages are unified into a single framework – this is a complete rewrite of MVC engine we use today, while we still have controllers, views and models under the hood MVC 6 is an improved and rewritten engine.  Web API is now fully integrated with MVC 6

  • C# 6, F# 4, VB 14

Note: .NET 4.6 is an in-place update to versions .NET 4, 4.5, 4.5.1, 4.5.2 > this means that after installation c:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework(bitness)\v4.0.30319 will be updated with the latest dlls, this is similar to how .NET 3.5 was an in-place update to .NET 2.0.  See also .NET Framework Versions and Dependencies
Today (August 2015)
SO if you are building an application today you can open Visual Studio 2015 and create new project(s) – web project – selecting .NET 4.6 and ASP.NET 4.6 templates (empty, web forms, mvc, etc.).  However, if you wanting to try out new ASP.NET 5 preview templates those are available too (i.e. choose .NET 4.6 and ASP.NET 5 (Preview) templates such as empty, web api and web application)

Also if you have not installed .NET 4.6 on the server you would choose to create a new project you could select .NET 4.5.2 and respective ASP.NET 4.5.2 web templates (empty, web forms, mvc, etc.)

Note here that Microsoft released Visual Studio 2015 with updates to existing frameworks as well as preview releases of ASP.NET and Entity Framework 7.  So confusing.
Visual Studio 2015 – Updates

  • JSON Editor
  • HTML Editor Updates
  • JavaScript Editor Improvements

Resources

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