This article will focus on the new stuff coming up with ASP.NET MVC 5.

• OWIN and Katana
• Identity and Membership
• Boostrap 3
• WebAPI 2
• Entity Framework 6
• SignalR
• Visual Studio 2013

Upgrading from ASP.NET MVC 4 to MVC 5

• Update .NET framework to at least .NET 4.5
• Update all NuGet packages
  • Microsoft.AspNet.Helpers.Mvc has been renamed (you will need to remove it)
  • update-package on the Package Manager Console if you are sure that you can update all dependencies
  • or, update only core assemblies ASP.NET MVC, Entity Framework, WebAPI, etc.
  • Update Web.Config assembly versions (from 2.0.0.0 to 3.0.0.0, or 4.0.0.0 to 5.0.0.0 in the case of MVC)
  • Install ASP.NET web helpers library.
• Remove GUID that identifies project as an MVC project {E3...BE47}

OWIN and Katana

Historically ASP.NET MVC has always been hosted in IIS. IIS provides a big collection of features to ASP.NET: session state, caching, authentication, compression, request tracing, etc. Over the last couple of years we have seen a shift in the way we architect web applications (Single Page Applications) in which the client performs a lot of the processing and the server only sends raw data (as opposed to rendering all the views in the backend as we did before). This shift means that, instead of IIS, it would be more interesting to use a fast, ligthweight and extensible host for web apps and services (particularly in the case of cloud applications). And within this context is were Katana appears.

Katana is a Microsoft implementation of the OWIN (Open Web Interface for .NET) standard. OWIN defines a standard interface between .NET web servers and web applications.

• Portable
• Modular
• Lightweight

Identity and Membership

Bootstrap 3

WebAPI 2

Entity Framework 6

SignalR

Visual Studio 2013

Resources

• ASP.NET MVC 5 Fundamentals