What's New for Web Developer in Visual Studio 2015

Introduction

We, Raphael Schwarz from codeworx and Rainer Stropek from time cockpit, did a session at the //build debriefing event from Microsoft Austria in June 2015. In this session we provided a brief overview about what changes in Visual Studio 2015 for web development. Raphael concentrated on the server-side, Rainer covered client-side web development.

Here are the topics we talked about during the session:

• ASP.NET 5 pipeline
  • Static content
  • Web API
• Entity Framework 7
  • Using EF together with ASP.NET 5 (ASP.NET dependency injection)
  • EF migrations with DNX tool
• REST web services metadata and documentation with Swagger
• Client-side dependency management
  • NodeJS and NPM for development dependencies
  • Bower for client-side components like AngularJS or Bootstrap
  • TSD for TypeScript Definitions
• Client-side build automation with Gulp
  • Gulp integration in Visual Studio 2015
• Client-side development tools and libraries
  • TypeScript
  • SASS
  • AngularJS
• Running ASP.NET 5 on Linux

This document should walk you through the code in this repository and make it easier to find the content you are looking for.

Configuring ASP.NET 5 Pipeline

Startup.cs contains the code that configures the ASP.NET pipeline. It configures Entity Framework and Swagger with just a few lines of code.

Entity Framework 7

Model and context for this sample are quite simple. You can find the model in Book.cs. The context is in BookContext.

Once you created context and model, you can use the dnx tool to work with EF Migrations. Here are some examples:

# Create a migration
dnx . ef migration add InitialCreate

# Create migration SQL script
dnx . ef migration script

# Apply migration to database
dnx . ef migration apply

Why this change from Powershell to dnx? The reason is the support of Linux in addition to Windows. dnx works on Linux, too.

Client-side dependency management

The primary focus of the client-side part of the session is introducing web development tools that Microsoft-oriented developers might not already use.

• In package.json you find development dependencies. This is necessary as other tools like Gulp are based on Node.js.
• bower.json references client-side libraries like Bootstrap or AngularJS.
• tsd.json contains references to TypeScript definitions.
• Finally, Gulpfile.js contains the build automation code.

During the session we showed the corresponding tools in the command line on Windows and Linux as well as in Visual Studio's new Task Runner Explorer.

Client-side web development

The folder wwwroot contains the client-side implementation using SASS, AngularJS, and TypeScript.