What’s coming in ASP.NET 5 RC 2

ASP.NET 5 RC 2 is scheduled for release in Feb 2016, after ASP.NET RC 1 released in Nov 2015. And this will be the last release before the final release. Go ahead and read Quick summary of what’s changed in ASP.NET 5 before you go further. In this quick post, let’s find out what’s coming in ASP.NET 5 RC 2 release.

What’s coming in ASP.NET 5 RC 2

UPDATE: ASP.NET 5 is now ASP.NET Core 1.0 and What’s new in ASP.NET 5 RC 2

As per ASP.NET team, “For RC2 we will move ASP.NET 5 to be based on the new cross-platform .NET Core command line toolchain.” So now there is a new dotnet command line interface and using this you will be able restore packages, compile, publish and run your ASP.NET 5 application from command line interface.

So to use command line interface, first you need to install .NET Core on your operating system. The installer is available for windows, Ubuntu, mac OS. This installer will install the tools and put them on your PATH. At the time of writing this post, only 64 bit platform MSI installer is present for installing .Net Core on windows. Once installed, you can execute following commands.

To restore the packages.

dotnet restore

This will restore all of the packages that are specified in the project.json file of the given sample.

To compile the source.

dotnet compile

And to compile source code in native language and it compiles your app into a single executable file (.exe).

dotnet compile --native

And running from source is straightforward.

dotnet run

You can also create a sample application “Hello World” using following command.

dotnet new

This command currently creates a Hello World application. There are other commands are also available like publish (Publishes a .NET project for deployment including the runtime) and Pack (Creates a NuGet package).

Now you must be thinking, dnx commands also perform the same thing like dnx run and dotnet run will perform the same task. So why a new cli?

Well, it seems that Microsoft may be replacing these dnx commands with dotnet command. And dnx will only be used for hosting purpose. And the reason could be it’s easier to remember for people who are learning .NET (dotnet is straightforward compared to dnx. dotnet run my code, instead of dnx run my code.) and it also inline with other languages like node, python, ruby etc.. These are just assumptions but we will come to know when it’s out.

It’s not the only name is changed but there is difference between dnx run and dotnet run command executes.

These are early days for dotnet cli and its looks very promising. It will be out sometime in Feb 2016.
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