In this chapter, we will cover:
- Creating our first ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms application
- Configuring our application to use unobtrusive validation
- Using Smart Tasks in the HTML editor
- Using WAI-ARIA support
- Using the Extract to User Control feature
- Using the Page Inspector feature
- Creating an asynchronous HTTP module
ASP.NET has definitely improved with .NET 4.5, providing us with better tools, capabilities, and performance.
As far as capabilities are concerned, the three "flavors" of ASP.NET are greatly enhanced. First, the new async features of .NET 4.5 are really interesting on ASP.NET. The web is becoming more interconnected every day, so asynchronous requests (and responses) are in all aspects of our daily work. Second, we have in our hands a greatly enhanced IDE with capabilities such as intelli-sense and improved support for the latest versions of web-development languages. Third, NuGet has been improved and now provides some componentized functionality for ASP.NET, such as Modernizr, which enables compatibility between browsers enabling/disabling HTML5 capabilities, jQuery, and so on.
There is even more candy, with features such as unobtrusive validation, an AntiXSS library, and EF Code First.
All in all, it's become an even better framework for web development!
The following sections will explore, in practice, some of these features to get a solid grasp on the new functionality. We will start by creating an example application using some of the new features of ASP.NET 4.5.