Improvements to ASP.NET Web Forms

While ASP.NET Web Forms is not part of the vNext initiative, it has not been ignored. As part of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2, it resumes support for new tools, EF integration, and Roslyn.

　Why Web Forms is not part of ASP.NET vNext

　To start, let’s explain the bad news. To improve performance and cross-platform portability, ASP.NET vNext is removing its dependency on System.Web. Compared to OWIN, it's slow and bulky, making testing more cumbersome than necessary.

Although they have tried many times to separate it, Web Forms is too closely connected to the rest of System.Web. That's just the beginning of the problem. System.Web and System.Design have circular dependencies. This situation should not even occur. To make things more complicated, System.Design also involves System.Windows.Forms.

All in all, Web Forms code is like a mess of spaghetti. But it will continue to be used, so Microsoft will still support it for now.

　Support for Roslyn

　 Web Forms has always included runtime compilation as part of its deployment strategy. This has not changed, but as an alternative implementation, developers can switch to the Roslyn-based CodeDOM provider. (CodeDOM is the compiler framework currently used by Web Forms) Pranav Rastogi wrote:

We tested an application of moderate size and complexity (600+ assemblies in bin directory, 500+ user controls & pages ), after enabling the new CodeDOM provider, which will be detailed below, the runtime compilation cost of the startup/precompilation phase dropped from about 15 minutes to about 70 seconds.

　Support ASP.NET Identity 2.0

ASP.NET Identity is a modern new membership management system for building ASP.NET applications. Identity makes it easier to add user profiles, social logins such as Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft accounts, Google, etc., and switch the persistence layer from SqlServer to Azure Table Storage. It also adds features like account confirmation, two-factor authentication, account lockout, single sign-on from any location, password reset and many other security-related features.

In this update, the Web Forms template has been modified to include features from ASP.NET Identity 2.0.

　Support for Entity Framework 6

　To support EF6, the following components have been updated:

EntityDataSource control

DynamicData provider

Universal provider

Web Forms scaffolding

Scaffolding is used in the ASP.NET MVC model Code generator for basic CRUD operations, rewritten in Visual Studio 2013. As a result of the rewrite, Microsoft can now provide scaffolding support for Web Forms. In particular, developers can create, replace, update, and delete views generated from a model object.

Readers can read the complete Web Forms announcement from the .NET Web Development and Tools blog.