ASP.NET Core 2.1 Features - Part One

• The handlers are quite expensive
• If startup of the application fails, it becomes very tough to diagnose the problem

To resolve these issues, .NET team is moving that mode into the in-process mode which means your application now would be hosted on IIS process which will improve the performance almost as 6x times and error handling becomes easier.

In short, the runtime and your app both will be loaded into the IIS worker process (w3wp.exe).

Some other features Razor pages improvement

Some improvements like support for Area in Razor pages and Support for shared directory inside the Pages folder – /Pages/Shared

MVC Functional test fixture

By this, you can easily test your MVC application end to end which includes routing, filters, controllers, actions, views, and pages.

This will resolve some of the issues of testing like,

• Shadow copy off
• Look for missing .deps files
• Set working directory correctly
• Prevent assembly cross talk
• Streamlines the bootstrapping of your app on the Test Server

More details here.

Build time Razor

All the razor pages and views will compile as part of a build which will improve startup performance.

I have already written a post on the same which you can find here.

UI as a library

This feature was needed for a long time.

Take your razor pages and views -> build them as an assembly -> ship them as a package -> people can use them.

Packaging Razor pages and views as a reusable library. Views and pages in libraries will automatically be discovered and can be overridden by the application.

Identity UI package and scaffolder

We know that using readymade templates, we can add Identity code into the newly created applications but if we require Identity code into an existing application then we need to write more code.

To resolve this problem, Net Core 2.1 will provide a default identity UI implementation as a library. We just need to add a NuGet package and then we can enable default identity UI in Startup class.

There will be a new scaffolder which will help us to reuse the same repetitive code of Identity. All the scaffolded identity code would be generated in an identity specific area folder so that it remains nicely separated from your application code.

New Partial Tag Helper

Currently, there are partial views renderers like Html.Partial and Html.RenderPartial etc. But there is some limitation of above renderers.

New partial tag helper will make rendering a partial straightforward and elegant. We can specify the model using model expression syntax and the partial Tag Helper will handle setting up the correct HTML field prefix for us.

For example, if you have a partial view named _PartialViewTest.cshtml, then you can use this into another cshtml page using Partial tag helper as below.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

Templates are updated with new privacy features.

For security - like Cookie Reason when creating a cookie and middleware that detects if the non-essential reason of cookie has been granted etc.

For Identity - like encrypting, downloading, deleting the user data.

Webhooks

Webhooks are my favorite. If you want to know bit more about the Webhooks then look at my post here. It is an old post but it can help to get basics of Webhooks.

Webhooks are a pattern where servers can provide the notifications to the applications in a decoupled way like basically HTTP request.

With 2.1, .NET Core team is porting a subset of the ASP.NET WebHooks receivers to ASP.NET Core.

They are planning to port the following receivers,

• Microsoft Azure alerts
• Microsoft Azure Kudu notifications
• Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Bitbucket
• Dropbox
• GitHub
• MailChimp
• Pusher
• Salesforce
• Slack
• Stripe
• Trello
• WordPress

You can find more details from here.

And videos from Channel 9 here,

• Part 1
• Part 2

In the future post, we will see some more .NET Core 2.1 features. Stay tuned.

Hope it helps.