Updated (2017): See .NET Framework Releases to learn about newer releases.

Today, we are announcing updates to the .NET Framework vNext, ASP.NET vNext and .NET Native. These are all available in Visual Studio “14” CTP4. This .NET Framework release contains RyuJIT, the next generation X64 JIT. ASP.NET vNext contains major improvements in the runtime and Visual Studio Experience. Additionally, .NET Native contains a small set of fixes for reported issues. Please download these .NET releases with Visual Studio “14” CTP4 and give us feedback.

.NET Framework vNext

Today’s release of .NET Framework vNext adds RyuJIT and ~ 150 new APIs. We have released multiple standalone versions of RyuJIT, after introducing you to it almost exactly one year ago. RyuJIT is the new Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler, now integrated into the .NET Framework and enabled by default for 64-bit processes.

We’ve added ~150 new APIs across the product to make many scenarios easier. We’ve also updated ~50 more APIs (mostly types). In particular, we sprinkled IReadOnlyCollection<T> in more parts of the Framework libraries to make collections easier and more intuitive to use.

You can see the changes in this diff from the .NET Framework 4.5.2 to .NET Framework 4.5.3.

You may be wondering when we’ll ship a separate redistributable for the .NET Framework vNext, like we’ve had for all other .NET Framework versions. We haven’t forgotten about it. It’s still coming.

ASP.NET vNext

ASP.NET vNext is a major update to MVC, WebAPI and SignalR, and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. CTP4 includes a large set of updates since the earlier CTP3 release. You can learn about the updates to the ASP.NET vNext runtime and libraries in the release notes on GitHub and the Visual Studio experience in the ASP.NET vNext in Visual Studio “14” CTP 4 blog post. The best place to learn more about ASP.Next vNext is from the links above, however, the highlights are covered below.

You can see the changes in ASP.NET vNext in this diff of ASP.NET from CTP 3 to CTP 4.

The ASP.NET vNext experience in Visual Studio “14” has improved:

• Project compilation is now much faster, using the Rosylyn compiler
• The NuGet package manager now support ASP.NET vNext projects.
• New solution layout with project template
• Debugging support for ASP.NET vNext unit tests

ASP.NET vNext can be run on .NET Framework and the new .NET Core runtime. Like the .NET Framework, .NET Core contains RyuJIT, the new 64-bit JIT. We also added ~220 APIs to .NET Core framework and similarly sprinkled IReadOnlyCollection<T> over more collection types. Our goal is to continue adding more functionality to .NET Core and ship those updates via NuGet.

You can see the changes in .NET Core in this diff of .NET Core from CTP3 to CTP4.

There are a few breaking changes since CTP3 that will require small fixups, if you are porting code that you wrote for CTP3 to CTP4.

.NET Native

There were a small set of updates that made it into .NET Native for this release. The following improvements are in today’s release:

• Fixes for various issues found in WCF support for .NET Native
• Running the .NET Native toolchain without specifying XAML roots
• Allow specifying a custom location for a TargetPlatform WinMD
• Support for an absolute output path

Summary

There are many new updates to try out in Visual Studio “14” CTP4, including .NET Framework vNext, ASP.NET vNext and .NET Native. Please try them out and give us feedback.

If you are new to ASP.NET, you can learn more about the overall release from the ASP.NET vNext site. There is lots of documentation, videos and access to samples there.

Last month, we released a dotnetsamples repo on GitHub. It’s the place where we will be releasing new samples over time, for all and any of the product releases discussed above. We have already accepted a couple pull requests and would be happy to accept many more.