The Next Generation of .NET – ASP.NET vNext

Today at TechEd North America, we announced the latest set of innovations that are part of the next generation of .NET. The biggest of those is ASP.NET vNext, which is an updated version of ASP.NET that been optimized for cloud Web development. We’ve continued to improve the core .NET technologies that we shared at Build last month, specifically the .NET Nativeahead-of-time compiler and the .NET Next Generation JIT (“RyuJIT”). Both have new releases you can try out. We also have a set of smaller announcements to share.

At Build last month, we announced the .NET Foundation. We are currently talking to over 25 community-based .NET projects and organizations about joining the foundation. The interest in the foundation has exceeded our expectations and is off to a great start.

We also announced the .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") at Build. It includes new C# and VB compilers and a preview of new language features being considered for C# 6. The project is open source on codeplex and has accepted its first pull requests from the community.

The final release of Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 is now available. Update 2 brings dozens of significant new features to Visual Studio developers, including tools for Windows Phone 8.1 and universal Windows apps.

While we’re looking forward, it’s also good to look at one of the current strengths of .NET. There are currently 1.8 billion active installs of .NET. That’s a very large number by any measure and a great base of desktop and server machines on which to run your apps.

.NET vNext

TechEd is the first time we’re talking about .NET vNext, as the next major release of the .NET Framework. At Build and TechEd, we’ve shared many of the features and components that you can expect in the next release. You will be able to compile C# 6 and VB with the Roslyn compilers, host ASP.NET vNext apps on the server or cloud, compile your Windows Store apps with the .NET Native ahead of time compiler, and enjoy faster desktop and server apps with the Next Generation JIT.

We’ve optimized .NET for the mobile-first and cloud-first development options that have become more common today. Device and cloud apps come with significant user expectations around performance, and also run in more specialized hardware/virtual environments. For Windows Store apps, we built the .NET native ahead of time compiler. For cloud apps, we’ve developed a cloud optimized mode.

.NET vNext will have a cloud optimized mode that enables you to deploy your apps with a copy of the .NET Framework libraries they need. Since the runtime and framework libraries are deployed on an app-basis, each app can run different versions of .NET vNext side-by-side and upgrade separately, all on the same machine. These libraries have been slimmed down significantly to reduce the footprint of the framework, and will be distributed via NuGet. Also, libraries such as WPF and Windows Forms have been removed from this mode.

We're developing this with cross-platform in mind, including an active collaboration with Xamarin to ensure that cloud-optimized .NET applications can run on Mac or Linux on top of the Mono runtime. The great productivity of .NET and ASP.NET can be available to teams working in mixed development environments.