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 when a notice goes out on Scott Hanselman’s Twitter feed with the exact link to each week’s hangout.
This week’s meeting is below:
Scott brought up a previous discussion: do we need the dot in this command-line: “dnx . web” — referencing this GitHub issue: https://github.com/aspnet/dnx/issues/1403
Damian explains that this is a breaking change that prevents Visual Studio from operating properly. We have committed to preventing breaking changes at this point. To accomplish this, Visual Studio and the ASP.NET framework are updated to be current version – 1 compatible. If ASP.NET needs an update, it gets the update but is backwards compatible to support VS 2015. In this way, VS 2015 can have a patch applied later to expose the new functionality in ASP.NET
Damian declared that there are changes in the RTM version of VS2015 to support a future version of the ASP.NET framework that has not yet been written or added to source control.
Scott shared that he now truly understands that the ASP.NET command-line interface is a programmatic interface that Visual Studio uses to integrate with ASP.NET
Damian followed up by declaring that the week of July 27th they plan to ship beta 6. A new version of the Visual Studio ASP.NET tooling, called WTE, at the same time as beta 6. The high-level schedule is still in progress, and should be agreed upon by all sides and published to GitHub as soon as a consensus is reached.
Community Links
The META link… the team shared last weeks transcript.. So that you know how meta-cool this is: I’m including a screenshot of Jon showing a screenshot. You’re welcome Scott…
- ASP.NET Beta 5 was announced on this very blog.
- The ASP.NET yeoman generators were updated and announced on this blog as well
- You can find the updated Yeoman generators on GitHub Don’t forget to check out the sub-generators for help scaffolding with your favorite file templates too…
- Scott recommends that developers who want to get involved take a good look at how these are assembled.
- Jason Imison wrote to share that the Omnisharp-Atom package for the Atom editor now comes with most of the refactorings that are in Visual Studio and A WHOLE LOT MORE!
- Damian complements Atom and the Omnisharp plugin, it is a simple install that delivers all that you need to get Atom + ASP.NET working.
- Kenji from Spoon chimed in that there are now ASP.NET 5 containers available, including ASP.NET dev. The dev containers are tied directly to the GitHub repo, so they have the latest updates.
- Jon pointed out a number of cool announcements courtesy of the ASP.NET GitHub Announcements repository:
- New dnu command: feeds list – This command lists the NuGet package feeds in effect for a particular directory
- Alex Zeitler has been following these changes, and has put together a write-up of the breaking changes from beta 4 to beta 5.
- Tugberk Ugurlu shared a pair of screencasts from Skills Matter about ASP.NET 5:
- Damien Bod shared a post about Elastic Search watcher events using ASP.NET 5, SIgnalR and Angular
- Not that its cronyism… but outspoken community member Damian Edwards shared a GitHub repository demonstrating how to use ASP.NET 5 with Raspberry Pi. This is NOT an official release from Microsoft, but merely a proof-of-concept to show that ASP.NET can be used in fun and interesting ways. This recipe involves configuring your Raspberry Pi with Windows 10 IoT Core.
- Damian claims that the steps in his repository work for him and makes no guarantees that it will work for you, so we award him the following badge:
Q and A
The community requested that the hangout be announced 30-45 minutes ahead. There are some small logistics issues with scheduling, but Scott promises to do his best
There was a request to share the HTML file templates on GitHub with the community. Damian indicated that they actually ARE on GitHub in a private repository, and there is a number of eyes on the templates to ensure that they help deliver a good experience for new developers to ASP.NET.
Scott followed-up with a request about possibly using the Yeoman templates that have been developed in place of the templates included in Visual Studio. Something could happen with that, but Damian does not think that will happen as Microsoft wants to deliver curated content as the starter experience. Scott agreed, and indicated that nothing prevents a developer from using the Yeoman generators with Visual Studio as a command-line based ‘File -> New’ option.
As a follow-up to the discussion about Raspberry Pi, Damian recommended that you buy a Raspberry Pi 2 from Element 14. Element 14 is the official distributor of Raspberry Pi in the United States, for those living outside of the US, consult the Raspberry Pi website for a distributor near you.
A question about performance was raised: why does it take so long between MVC controller code modification and first-byte in browser? Damian described the compilation process to deliver that first byte, and declared a 1 second target performance the team is working towards.
Why does the DNX store its resources in the %USERPROFILE%/.dnx folder? Damian and Jon had a discussion about this, and it’s a design by the ASP.NET team to ensure that the dnx resources are stored in the same place no matter the operating system in use. In Unix / Linux based environments, a user’s home folder holds important application specific content in folders that are prefixed with a dot and then hidden. This convention was carried over to all operating systems by ASP.NET
A question up about possibly forcing a refresh of a browser viewing a website being debugged when a compile completes in Visual Studio. After some discussion, the guys acknowledged it as a good idea and will discuss providing similar functionality in a future update.
A viewer asked about pressure on the community to adapt the next versions of dnx by discontinuing support for earlier versions. Damian assured that all versions of .NET since v4 have been in-place updates, replacing previous versions on disk. He went on to explain that the servicing base-line was reset to .NET 4.5.1 in 2014 and this means that service updates to .NET are only available to .NET 4.5.1 and later. There is no pressure on the community to upgrade to the latest version of dnx and ASP.NET 5.
Scott followed-up by describing that ASP.NET 4.6 is alive and well and is production ready on July 20th with the Visual Studio launch. Scott admitted that his blog still runs ASP.NET 2, and he has been updating it with Visual Studio 2015 and Roslyn tools to improve performance and stability. With the new updates, Scott can now run his website on an Apple Watch. Okay, that’s a stretch…
Regarding performance testing, there are team members working on implementing some experimental changes in the kestrel web server. Damian says that they’ve run into a problem where they have saturated the gigabit NIC on the test machines and they need to upgrade the test hardware to 10 gigabit and run the tests again.
With a dramatic zoom-out, the meeting concluded. Watch Scott’s twitter feed next week, on July 14th around 18:00 UTC for the link to the next ASP.NET community hangout.
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