ASP.NET Web Tools 2012.2 Release Candidate

 Last Month, Microsoft released the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 update.  This release will extend the ASP.NET runtime a little bit and adds new tools to Visual Studio 2012. This update adds some new features and tools for all the flavors of ASP.NET (Web Forms, MVC, Web API, etc.).  I copied some of the highlights from the release marketing below.  It sounds pretty cool.

ASP.NET Enhancements
This update adds new ASP.NET templates and features, including:

• New ASP.NET MVC templates.
  • Creating Facebook applications just became easier using the new Facebook Application template. In just a few easy steps you can create a Facebook application that gets data from logged in users and integrates with their friends.
  • A new Single Page Application template allows developers to build interactive client-side web apps using Knockout, jQuery, and ASP.NET Web API.
• Real-time communication support with ASP.NET SignalR.  This enables you to easily take advantage of the new WebSocket support in .NET 4.5, while also automatically degrading to long-polling and other protocols for older clients.  If you haven’t tried SignalR yet you should – it is awesome.
• New ASP.NET Web API functionality, including support for OData, integrated tracing, and automatically generating help page documentation for your API.
• New ASP.NET Friendly URL functionality. This new feature makes it very easy for Web Forms developers to generate cleaner looking URLs (without the .aspx extension). The Friendly URLs feature also makes it easier for developers to add mobile support to their applications with support for mobile .ASPX pages and  supporting switching between desktop and mobile views.  It can be used with existing ASP.NET v4.0 applications.
• Visual Studio 2012 Web publishing enhancements. Web site projects now have the same publish experience as web application projects (including to Windows Azure Web Sites), and you can selectively publish files, see the differences between local and remote files, and update local to remote files or vice versa.
• Visual Studio 2012 Page Inspector enhancements. JavaScript selection mapping is now supported, and you can CSS updates in real-time.
• Visual Studio 2012 editor support for Knockout IntelliSense and pasting JSON as a .NET class (which makes it even easier to consume Web APIs from others).
• Visual Studio 2012 Project Template updates, including the latest versions of jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Validation, Modernirz, Knockout and more…

How it is delivered
You can download and install an integrated setup that contains the above enhancements today from http://www.asp.net/vnext.  The new runtime functionality is delivered to ASP.NET via additional NuGet packages. This means that installing this update does not make any changes to the existing ASP.NET binaries, and thus does not cause any compatibility issues with existing projects. New projects will contain the new functionality and existing projects can be updated with the new NuGet packages.

Summary
Web development is changing, and ASP.NET is rapidly delivering new capabilities to developers that help them take full advantage of new capabilities.  The ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 update installs in minutes without altering the current ASP.NET run time components.  For a complete description see the Release Notes.

You can download and install the RC today: http://www.asp.net/vnext.