ASP.NET Community Standup – August 18, 2015

Jeffrey Fritz

This is the next in a series of blog posts that will cover the topics discussed in the ASP.NET Community Standup.  The community standup is a short video-based discussion with some of the leaders of the ASP.NET development teams covering the accomplishments of the team on the new ASP.NET 5 framework over the previous week.  Within 30 minutes, Scott Hanselman, Damian Edwards, Jon Galloway and an occasional guest or two discuss new features and ask for feedback on important decisions being made by the ASP.NET development teams.

Each week the standup is hosted live on Google Hangouts and the team publishes the recorded video of their discussion to YouTube for later reference. The guys answer your questions LIVE and unfiltered.  This is your chance to ask about the why and what of ASP.NET!  Join them each Tuesday on live.asp.net where the meeting’s schedule is posted and hosted.

This week’s meeting is below:

Today’s meeting featured a visit from our boss, Scott Hunter with some important information about education for the ASP.NET 5 tools.

Damian started the conversation by announcing that ASP.NET 5 beta 8 coding is starting this week and beta 7 verification should be completed next week with a public release shortly after.  The beta 8 release is focused on polish and not so much on new features.  Look for bug fixes, engineering debt to be addressed, stress testing improvements, performance improvements, and a general improvement in the ASP.NET 5 experience.

The beta 7 release should be in the first week of September with a big push on cross-platform updates including new .NET core drops for Linux, Mac, and Windows.  There is a significant update for dnvm that will allow installing runtimes for alternate platforms besides the platform you are developing on.  The .NET Core update includes networking and HttpClient features that will allow cross-platform networking with ASP.NET.  This also means that dnu commands on Mac and Linux will; run without requiring the mono runtime.

Scott Hunter next talked about the need for education around the new ASP.NET and shared some success stories about workshops that were delivered at conferences earlier in 2015.  He requested some feedback from our ASP.NET community:  do you prefer the eight hour paid workshop format at conferences that walks through developing a real web application or the one hour breakout session that discusses features?  Please reply in the discussion area below with your thoughts.

Scott also shared the current travel schedule for the ASP.NET program managers.  (editor’s note: I’ve added some other entries to this list that Scott did not have on his initial slide)

In the 2016 timeframe, as we close in on the RTM date of ASP.NET 5, look for more postings about in-person opportunities to work with the ASP.NET team with workshops and sessions at conferences near you.  If there is an event in 2016 that you want to see us visit, reply in the discussion are below with the event information and contact information and we’ll reach out to discuss how we can work with your event.

If you can’t make it to some of these events, look for three new Microsoft Virtual Academy courses to be released around ASP.NET 5 topics.  There will be an introduction course, an advanced course, and then a cross-platform development course.  These courses will be released over the next few months, keep an eye on this blog and on the ASP.NET standup for more information as they are released.

Links of the Week:

• James Chambers has a blog post showing how to write custom dnx commands
• David Paquette wrote a post called “The complete guide to MVC 6 Tag Helpers“
• Marcos Placona documented his experience about using Visual Studio Code on a Mac and as an added bonus, covered how to use the Twilio APIs from a Mac as well
• Sayed Hashimi wrote on the MSDN web development blog about unit testing dnx with SideWaffle and xUnit
• Josh Graham wrote about his process of upgrading ASP.NET beta 5 to 6
• Dave Mariani documented how to run dnx applications as a Windows service – influenced by Damian’s comments from the previous week
• Jerry Pelser blogged about resolving dependencies differently based on if a user is logged in
• Ben A Adams shows how to reduce node module recursion with npm v3 (in prerelease).  This technique helps to resolve the long pathname issue on Windows.

As a follow-up comment to Sayed’s blog post, Damian indicated that The unit test project is coming back in the One ASP.NET dialog in beta 8 or RC.  As API churn goes down, this feature will be re-enabled.

Q and A

Question: Now that .NET Core 5 is split into assemblies, how do I find what I want? Use the packagesearch.azurewebsites.net site to help search for the APIs you are looking for.  A Visual Studio feature is being built that will provide this feature as a lightbulb on the left gutter.

Question: A header is added for server in the response to a client. What is the best way to kill the header? Can an action filter solve this? Its not added by ASP.NET, the server adds that and you need to kill it there.  On IIS you should be able to modify configuration to handle it.  Kestrel adds the entry in the headers collection and it can be modified since Kestrel is managed code in the ASP.NET pipeline.  Damian recommends attempting to do it with middleware on ASP.NET 5, or modules in older ASP.NET versions.

Question: Can the team visit South Africa? We’ll plan to visit next year

Question: Any drawbacks on Workshops vs. talks? Workshops are not recorded, as they are paid for separately, and much longer.  At big commercial shows, one hour breakout sessions are recorded or streamed.  Our Workshops will also be available on Microsoft Virtual Academy.  Additionally, look for the ASP.NET CodeShow coming soon with Scott Hanselman and Glenn Condron.

Question: Any word on Auth Server? The ASP.NET Team is working with Auth Server so that it is ready in November with the ASP.NET 5 RC.  We are still working on some details around if it will be included in the box, but it will probably be the recommended security solution

Question: Do we have a performance testing update this week? Kestrel hit 164k requests/sec and the team is working towards about five times that performance, but may not hit that for v1.  This performance will improve as the product matures and there is lots of work on performance across MVC, not just Kestrel

Question: When can I create Azure cloud projects integrated with vNext projects? Web and Worker roles are to be determined wIth the new forms of compute being offered, the team is trying to decide if we should invest in the v1 or new v2 version for this.  We’re leaning towards to v2 but need feedback, please give us yours in the discussion area below.

Question: Entity Framework does not seem as stable as MVC EF7 is shipping with ASP.NET 5.  There are some known takebacks that are documented on their site and you should log issues on GitHub if you find any.  There is no plan to go back to EF6, it is not compatible with .NET Core or Mac and Linux.

Question: Is any work being done on obfuscation? No… no work on IL obfuscation has been started by Microsoft, however others could contribute this feature.

Question: It would be interesting to review the business and development process by which ASP.NET re-write was approached. Neat idea… maybe something we can discuss in 2016.

Summary

The team is looking for a lot of feedback on a number of topics.  Reply in the discussion area below and we’ll follow up with you.  Look for the next standup on Tuesday September 8th at 17:00 UTC on live.asp.net

Jeffrey Fritz Principal Program Manager, .NET Community Team

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