Introduction of Web Development Features in Visual Studio 2013

Introduction

This article describes the new features of Web Development Tools for Visual Studio 2013. Microsoft also launched Web Tools Refresh for Visual Studio 2013 Preview that is free to download from the MSDN site. The following are the new Web Development features:

• SignalR Channel
• Claim Based Authentication
• HTML Editor
• Bootstrap
• Entity Framework
• MVC 5
   

SignalR Channel

This is the new feature named Browser Link-SignalR channel between browsers and Visual Studio 2013. Now the developers can select multiple browsers for development sites at the same time. It automatically shows the connected browsers by clicking the toolbar refresh button. Now, the developer does not need to go to the Solution Explorer and choose the browser to run the application. The developer can directly choose the browser from the toolbar of the IDE and debug the application .

Claim Based Authentication

Microsoft announced this new feature Claim Based Authentication in Visual Studio 2013. It helps users for verifying their account using username and password, social services account or organizational accounts. This feature is also helpful for authorizing client requests to your Web API. In the claim based authentication, the identity of the user is to be represented as a set of claims by the trusted issuer. 

HTML Editor

HTML Editor is the new web development tool provided by Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 Preview. It enables you to create Razor files and web project HTML files. Developers in Web Forms files and in Windows Store application files still use HTML editor because it has some legacy improvements like automatic bracket completion, jQuery UI, attribute IntelliSense grouping. They are present in Text Editors with the name of HTML (Razor).

Bootstrap

Microsoft announced that Bootstrap is the popular framework for websites that was launched out of Twitter in 2011. Now Visual Studio 2013 Preview uses the Bootstrap feature if you select the web app of Microsoft ASP.NET. Bootstrap themes are used in web applications for making their sites stand out a bit more. Bootstrap uses CSS3 to provide a responsive design, which means the layout of the running application is dynamically adapted to various browser window sizes. You can choose from various themes for your application to look better.    

Entity Framework

With the release of Visual Studio Preview 2013, Microsoft also include the latest version of Entity Framework 6.0.0 beta1. Entity Framework creates a model by writing code or using boxes and lines in Entity Framework designer. Both of these approaches is used to target an existing database or create a new database. In the Entity Framework Designer, the model shows the relationships among the tables automatically.

MVC 5

Microsoft launched MVC 5 with the release of .NET Framework 4.5.1. Now, the developer can work with a MVC 5 based project with the selection of new ASP.NET Projects. In general, if the MVC checkbox is checked during the creation of a new ASP.NET project then you can work on it. MVC 5 projects are now standard web applications and it does not use its own project GUID.