Redesigned from the ground up the next version of ASP.NET (“ASP.NET vNext”) aims to create a lean and composable .NET stack for building modern cloud-based apps. It’s open source and comes under .Net Foundation that allows developers to build, run and manage ASP.NET Applications.
This article portrays on the core characteristics of ASP.Net vNEXT with some major changes when compared to ASP.NET.
Getting Started With ASP.NET Vnext: Features Explained
* More robust and less in size, ASP.Net vNEXT is a cloud optimized framework which is only 11 MB in size whereas the full version of .Net is around 200 MB.
* MVC is a single programming model for websites (MVC, Web Pages) and services (Web APIs) and, unified Controller class that serves both MVC Controller and Web API Controller.
* Developers can define assemblies followed with versions, commands and versions of ASP.Net. On the other hand if working in non Visual Studio environment you can use command line KPM restore command to download dependencies.
* In Roslyn (.Net Compiler Platform) dynamic compilation is a big feature that developers can change code and refresh the browser without building the whole project.
* It offers side by side support to deploy own version of .NET framework with each application as they have its own .net framework version running side by side on single machine.
* Being open source, vNext is host agnostic which means you can host your app in IIS, or self-host in a custom process as Web API 2 and SignalR 2 already support self-hosting alongside vNext brings this same capability to MVC.
Having said all the core competencies of this new web application framework, vNext is not backwards compatible with existing ASP.NET applications. Howbeit, the current frameworks such as Web Forms 5, MVC 5, Web API 2, Web Pages 3, SignalR 2, and Entity Framework 6 will continue to ship in Visual Studio, and will be fully supported in ASP.NET vNext.

