Exploring What is New in ASP.

NET MVC

When we look around in today's world, what we see is devices all around.
Devices from mobiles to tablets to computers surround us and now the world
is talking about internet of things. IOT means communicating between
devices where each device will provide some relevant information to other
so as to provide a customer with highest level of service. Example can be a
Phone providing information about the user reaching home in around 10
minutes so that the AC can switch-on itself.
So here, when we can speak about communication or talk about internet and
with internet; comes a world that suddenly seems much smaller than it is.
Websites and applications are the main medium/interface using which
people share and get information with each other. So how do this happen? To
make a website we need a platform that is robust and reliable enough to
handle huge traffic (people coming in to view website), should deliver better
performance, provide enterprise level security and importantly should have
minimal up time(time from development to production).
What to choose and why?
Important question that comes into picture now is what should be used to
build such an application. There are various technologies like Java, Php,
Python, and Node.js to name a few. So what is the advantage of using .net
over them? Main advantage of using ASP.NET is the time that it takes to build
an application from on paper to the actual server. It is far less than that of
java. Then comes the fact that we can use any language from C#, F#, C to
C++ to build components all the languages mentioned are compiled
languages which gives us an advantage over interpreter languages like
Python, JavaScript (nodejs), etc. Yes, there are compliers that are built to
compile languages like Python but the ASP.NET supports concurrency and

asynchronous pattern, which gives it an advantage over interpreted

languages. Then comes the enterprise level support that it has due to vast
experience of over 12 years in enterprise industry. In addition, another fact is
that ASP.NET has a good set of stable plugin's and CMS's built around it,
which helps us build enterprise solutions at rapid speed.
ASP.NET is a framework that has evolved over the time. Its major breaking
change was when it started supporting MVC. This pattern allowed .Net to
dump the old page life cycle pattern, which at times caused hindrances and
also performance issues as for every click or a postback whole page life
cycle events used to get executed. Also as the time passed the processing
power of the machines improved. Now the client side scripts play a major
role when architecting a solution as they help reduce the load of the server
to a good extent as all the rendering logic is handled/processed by the client
machine. Also there are various plugins developed in JavaScript that handle
graphics and animations like pro. This gives a website a good look and feel
and also since they are handled at client end they help the server to focus
on processing the actual business logic.
The MVC architecture
MVC architecture is loosely coupled. This means that the server is only
concerned about the data that it needs to send to client and then its client's
responsibility to handle that, as it wants. Hence, every single entity has a
predefined role. One more advantage of this is that anytime we can replace
the whole entity without even disturbing the other. Example: Suppose we
have used Jquery to handle the rendering logic of the webpage but then later
we found that React or Angular serve the purpose better so we can easily
replace the client side logic with ours and it will not require a single code
change at server logic. Since the server, side is just concerned about the
data that the client passes it to process and the data that it needs to send.
MVC also had its own demerits even though it is a great architecture. Now
with the evolution of MVC6 most of the demerits that MVC5 had are resolved
the architecture is further enhanced to improve the performance and
stability of the application that is built. MVC6 along with ASPNET 5 has taken
a pick from best of various other technologies like Python, Nodejs so that it
can provide a one-stop solution to the problems in hand.
The major advantages of MVC6 are as follows:
1. The time has gone when we use to say that only Microsoft servers run
Microsoft technologies. ASP.NET 5 is built to support Linux distros and
MAC OS as well.

2. Another major feature is use only what you need i.e. everything now is
a middleware so we can now plug-in a piece of code that we want to
run for a request. This means that we will only register the features
that we need and the MVC will load them on startup. Hence, a
performance improvement since we are only running what we need. If
we do not need sessions for our website, we will not add them to our
start-up and hence will save our processing of sessions middleware.

3. Dependency Injection is a built-in feature of the framework. What does

this mean for us? This means that now our application is more loosely
coupled and testable. Using dependency injection we inject
dependencies at runtime, since these dependencies are resolved at
runtime we can easily replace them without changing the core
functionality of the project. Example: We have a class say Price
Calculator, which implements IPrice that calculates and returns a price
for our product, but now we need to provide discount on certain days
of the year. So suppose we implement a different class say Discount
Calculator which will host the logic of calculating the discounted
amount and then just need to replace the configuration to load one
class on special days and replace it with other on the other days (Very
vague example but just to give you a gist of it).
4. ASPNET now has core framework which means that now if the
underlying machine does not have the .net framework then too its fine.
The ASPNET 5 will be built as a complete deployable package, which
would contain the whole 11 MB framework and the rest of libraries to
support our application. Also this means that now we can run two
different .net frameworks on a single machine as both run on their own
app domains which was not possible until now. Hence no need of IT
team approval now as we need not change the server configuration to
support the new framework as it is a self-contained entity.

5. All the configuration files are now in json. What is the advantage of
this? Advantage is that json format consumes far less space than xml
when we consider huge files. Also reading a json file is much faster

than an xml file. In the end, it means better performance for the
application.
6. One major feature is that now we do not use System. Web for Http
Context. Also now, the Http Context will hold about 2kb of data instead
of 30kb. This means further performance increase as now we would
have to process far lesser data on every request. Also far, less data
would be transferred between method calls this in turn enhances
performance.
7. MVC till now did not had a perfect replacement for user control that we
use to have in web forms, but now with the introduction of View
Components it has provided a solution. View Components act like mini
controllers with better separation of concerns and usability. They are
invoked like calling a function.
8. The crucial part is, it's also open source.

Apart from the features mentioned above there are also list of features that
are currently in process, hence will update the article as and when they
come into picture. Also there is some document management like library
that is built which is taken as a reference from python.

Original Source:
http://www.advancesharp.com/blog/1154/exploring-what-isnew-in-asp-net-mvc