Start the New Taste of Visual Studio 2012 With Web Tools 2013.1

• ASP.NET MVC 5 Template
  
  The latest MVC 5 template is now available to develop the ASP.NET Web Application in Visual Studio 2012. You can now use scaffolding for the controllers and views. As I said earlier, there is an empty MVC 5 project available to create the ASP.NET Web Application. So let us have an example to create and MVC 5 project in Visual Studio 2012 using the following procedure:
  
  Step 1: Open Visual Studio 2012 (Updated). Ensure that your Visual Studio 2012 is updated.
  
  Step 2: Select the Web option in the left pane and create the Empty MVC 5 project.
  
  
  
  Step 3: Now as you can see in your Solution Explorer, your project is empty. So at first we'll create a model class.
  
  Step 4: From the NuGet Package, install the Entity Framework 6 in your solution.
  
  
  
  Step 5: Add a Model class by right-clicking on the Models folder and add a Class as User.cs.
  
  
  
  Replace the boilerplate code with the following code:
  

  using System;

  using System.Data.Entity;

  namespace NewMvcDemo.Models

  {

  publicclassUser

  {

  publicint ID { get;set; }

  publicstring Name { get;set; }

  publicstring City { get;set; }

  publicstring Company { get;set; }

  }

  publicclassUserDbContext : DbContext

  {

  publicDbSet<User> Users { get;set; }

  }

  }

  Step 6: Open the Web.Config file and in the <configuration>, add the following code:
  

  <connectionStrings>

  <addname="UserDbContext"

  connectionString="Data Source=(LocalDb)\v11.0; AttachDbFilename=|DataDirectory|\User.mdf;

  Integrated Security=true"

  providerName="System.Data.SqlClient"/>

  </connectionStrings>
  
  Step 7:Open theApp_Start\RouteConfig.cs file and modify the code with the following code:
  
  publicstaticvoid RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)

  {

  routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

  routes.MapRoute(

  name: "Default",

  url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",

  defaults: new { controller = "User", action = "Index",
  id = UrlParameter.Optional }

  );

  }
  
  Step 8: Now by right-clicking on the Controllers folder, add a new Scaffolded Item as in the following:

  
  
  Step 8: In the Add Scaffold wizard, do as shown below:
  
  
  
  Step 9: Enter the Controller name, select the model class and context class in the next Add Controller wizard:
  
  
  
  It will scaffold the controller and create the CRUD operations in it. I will show how to do CRUD operations in a future article.
  
  Step 10: Now debug your application.
  
  
  
  As you know, this is an empty project, therefore we need to create the Home, Account controllers. Here in the preceding image we can see our newly created UserController.
  

• ASP.NET Web API 2 Template
  
  The Web API 2 template was also be added in this new release. It is referenced by the latest web API 2 NuGet packages to use scaffolding the controllers and views. Have a look:
  
  

Entity Framework 6

The latest version of Entity Framework, EF 6, is to used when the MVC or Web API 2 controllers and views are scaffolded. This is not added by default. You need to add it manually as you added it in Step 4 in the preceding section.

ASP.NET Scaffolding

The ASP.NET Scaffolding is a code generation framework for ASP.NET Web Applications. We cannot use scaffolding in the previous version of Visual Studio except in ASP.NET MVC projects but using ONE ASP.NET we can use it for all projects. Have a look:

scaffolding image

NuGet 2.7

NuGet 2.7 is the new release of NuGet packages. We can use a rich set of new features that are defined in the Release Notes of NuGet 2.7. Have a look at the following procedure.

Step 1: Open "Extensions and Updates" from the Tools menu.

Step 2: Check out the latest NuGet Package for the Visual Studio. As you can see, the latest NuGet Package is installed on my Visual Studio IDE.

Razor 3

You can also get the benefit of the Razor 3 features, like highlighting and Intellisense, while creating the cshtml files in the ASP.NET Projects. Have a look at the following procedure to create the MVC 5 Razor pages.

Step 1: Right-click on the View folder to add a Razor page.

Step 2: Try out the Razor syntax as shown below:

Summary

You can get the benefits of the latest version of Visual Studio 2012 or Visual Studio 2012 Express. You can also use various features that are used in the Visual Studio 2013 with the release of Web Tools 2013.1 for the Visual Studio 2012. Thanks for reading.