With the release of Visual Studio “14” CTP we now have access to limited tooling for ASP.NET vNext. Here is a quick view on the new toy.

Download and install

Visual Studio "14" CTP can be downloaded here

Beware that this version of visual studio is a preview and should not be installed alongside other versions of visual studio.

It's recommended to install Visual Studio "14" CTP on a virtual machine. You can easily use Windows Azure for this. There's already an image available for install.

Create an ASP.NET vNext site

Under Visual C# web templates there's access to multiple types of ASP.NET vNext templates.

Add packages from project.json

In ASP.NET vNext we reference NuGet packages and not dll's. These references are done from the new project.json file. Below I am using intellisense in visual studio to add a reference to Entity Framework.

When saving my project.json file Entity Framework 6.1 is added to my references in the Solution Explorer.

Go cloud optimized on Windows Azure

One of the new features of ASP.NET vNext is a cloud optimized version of the framework. Go to your projects configuration properties. Here you can select the cloud optimized version of the .NET framework.

When this is done you can deploy our brand new cloud optimized ASP.NET vNext site to Windows Azure. Nothing is new in the deployment process. If you're new to Windows Azure you can see the deployment process here

Now go play with our new toy :-)