ASP.NET 5 is an open source web framework for building modern web applications that can be developed and run on Windows, Linux and the Mac.
- Complete re-write of the ASP.NET platform
It isn’t a layer on existing platform, everything is written from scratch.
- ASP.NET 5 is now cross platform and open source.
Yes, you heard it correctly. We can develop ASP.NET 5 on Windows, Linux, Mac OS and play around with its source code.
Cross platform is being achieved using .NET Core which is a subset of complete .NET framework.
- Single platform for MVC and web API.
We were using “Controller” for MVC and “APIController” for Web API, now it’s just “Controller” for MVC and Web API meaning same programming stack for both of them.
- Webforms gone
WebForms aka ASPX pages are out of ASP.NET 5 and it is considered as legacy now.
- Everything is dependency
In existing development of ASP.NET, we use to load lots of functionalities even if it was not required. Now load dependencies using NuGet packages i.e. if you need them, then only use, else exclude making ASP.NET 5 leaner.
- Lower memory footprint
Since we are loading what we need, it results in lower memory footprint leading to faster and more performance oriented ASP.NET
- Multiple deployment support
ASP.NET 5 can deployment on Cloud (AWS or AZURE), IIS (Windows) or completely as self-hosted app on Windows, Linux or Mac.
- ASP.NET 5 is completely composed
ASP.NET 5 is composed of only bootstrap and CLR and nothing else. Everything else is NuGet package, if you want to use it then add it.
MVC, Static Files, Logging, Configuration, Identity etc. are all packages, keep adding them if required, else remove it.
- Adopted open web development
Open Web development has lots of great tools such as NPM, Bower, Grunt, Gulp which has its own advantages making development and maintenance simpler. All these are part of ASP.NET 5 and if required use it.