ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 Update

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If may be difficult to track what's being released when but the recently released ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 update is one you should definitely take note of. This update makes no changes to the existing ASP.NET runtime, is fully compatible with existing projects and development environment and will also be included with the upcoming Visual Studio 2012 Update 2 (currently at CTP 4).

Here's a brief list representing a subset of all enhancements in this release:

  • New Facebook ASP.NET MVC Application template to develop Facebook Canvas applications.
  • New Single Page Application template for ASP.NET MVC to build interactive client-side web apps on top of ASP.NET Web API. 
  • Pre-release of Windows Azure Authentication for MVC, Web Pages, and Web Forms to authenticate Office 365 on-premises users, corporate accounts synced from on-premise Active Directory, or users created in custom Windows Azure Active Directory domain.
  • Visual Studio 2012 template support for creating SignalR projects as well as adding SignalR support to existing Web Forms and MVC applications.
  • ASP.NET templates have updated versions of jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Validation, Modernizr, Knockout.
  • Web site projects now have the same publish experience as web application projects, including publishing to Windows Azure Web Sites.
  • Visual Studio 2012 editor supports syntax highlighting for CoffeeScript, Mustache, Handlebars, JsRender.
  • ASP.NET Web API supports OData endpoints that can have both ATOM and JSON-light formats
  • New built-in ASP.NET Web API tracing functionality with output automatically written to the Visual Studio output window, IntelliTrace, and any other trace listener.