This articles describe one of the newest runtime features in ASP.NET 4.5. I will describe about Muticore Just-In-Compiler (JIT) in the .NET framework 4.5.

Multicore Just-in-Time (JIT) 

In the .NET framework 4.5, Microsoft has introduced an enhancement of the pervious JIT compiler by making it a Multicore JIT compiler, that runs on the two cores and supports parallelism in the compilation process in order to improve the launch performance during application startup.

From the developer point of view the Multicore JIT is a very cool runtime feature in .NET Framework 4.5 to improve their productivity and speed up the overall performance of an application. Now the developer can benefit from multicore processors to speed up the application compilation process.

The Multicore JIT compiler works in parallel with two cores. Because of the two cores, Multicore JIT can make your application start the process faster at startup. Multicore JIT provides significant improvements to Web based applications as well as Desktop Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) applications.

Working of Multicore JIT

Nowadays, every PC has at least two cores, so the JIT compiler is built to make the investment worthwhile. Using the Multicore JIT, methods are compiled on two CPUs so that the application is able to reach the end of its startup execution quickly.

The compilation process is done in two cores that run in parallel executing the Multicore JIT compiler. The more effective Multicore JIT will reduce the startup time of an .NET application. 

Multicore JIT uses the two modes of operation.

Recording mode: It is the first mode, when JIT compiles the entire program and creates a JIT profile using a profile optimization class and saves the profile that was executed to a given folder to disk.

Playback mode: This mode is used when the application is launched subsequently. Playback mode is used to load the profile that was saved during the Recording mode from the disk using the background JIT thread in order to support the main thread.

The feature works by the JIT compiling the methods likely to be executed based on profiles created during previous compilations, that will runs on a separate processor core taking care of the JIT Compilation while the main execution thread runs on a different core.

In the ideal case, the second core quickly gets ahead of the mainline execution of the application, so whenever a method is required it is already compiled. As a result, the main thread doesn't need to do as much compilation, and your application launches faster.

In order to know which methods to compile, the feature generates profile data in the Recording mode that keeps track of the methods that are executed. Then the next time the application runs the call will look for that profile and when it finds it then it plays back; that means it starts compiling all the methods that was saved for that profile.

Note: MultiCore JIT requires a multicore machine to take advantage of its algorithms otherwise the CLR will ignore it on single core machines.

How to enable Multicore JIT in an .NET 4.5 application.

You can use this feature of the runtime to significantly improve the startup times of both client applications and Web sites in .NET framework 4.5.

Since ASP.NET applications run in a hosted environment, this feature is turned on for these applications automatically. Therefore JIT compiling using multiple cores is enabled by default in ASP.NET 4.5 and Silverlight 5.

But, if you want to disable this feature in your ASP.NET 4.5 applications then write the following code in the web.config file.

<system.web>
  <compilation profileGuidedOptimizations="None" />
</system.web>

But in a Windows based application, you will need to enable Multicore JIT feature explicitly.

Let's see how.

It is simple to use Multicore JIT, there is a class in the .NET Framework named "System.Runtime.ProfileOptimization" that you can use to start profiling at the entry point of your application. 

Optimization Profilers

The ProfileOptimization is a new type introduced in .Net 4.5 to improve the startup performance of application domains in applications that require the just-in-time (JIT) compiler by performing background compilation of methods that are likely to be executed, based on profiles created during previous compilations.

See the MSDN documentation for more information.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-IN/library/system.runtime.profileoptimization.aspx

The two methods that you can call at the entry point of your application.

SetProfileRoot: This method is used to specify the root path, where to save the JIT profile compiled information for optimization.

StartProfile: This method is used to start Multcore just in-time compilation.

You must write the following code in your application constructor in order to enable Multicore JIT.

public App()
{

 ProfileOptimization.SetProfileRoot(@"C:\MyAppFolder");
 ProfileOptimization.StartProfile("Startup.Profile");

}

Now that's all to enable the Multicore feature in your application; the rest of the work will be handled by the CLR automatically.

ASP.NET 4.5 Preview introduces new model binding for  ASP.NET web forms. The concept of model binding was first introduced with ASP.NET MVC and now it has incorporated with ASP.NET Web Forms. You can easily perform any CURD operation with any sort of data controls using any data access technology like Entity Framework,  ADO.NET, LINQ to SQL Etc.  In this post I am going talk about how you can bind the data with ASP.NET DropdownList using new Model Binding features.

Let’s say we have a speaker database and we wants to bind the name of the speakers with the DropDownList.  First placed an ASP.NET Dropdown control with the page  and set the “DataTextField” and “DataValueField” properties.

We can set the  ddlName.DataSource to specifying the data source from the code behind and bind the data with dropdpwnlist, but  in this case from the code behind to providing the data source.

Now, instead of specifying the DataSource, we will be setting the Dropdownlists SelectMethod property to point a method GetSpeakerNames() within the code-behind file.

Select method is expected to return us result of type IQueryable<TYPE>. Here is GetSpeakerName() method is defined as follows.

So, Instead of specifying the data source we are specifying the SelectMethod, which return the IQueryable type of Speaker object. Run the application, you will find the names binded with dropdown list. Hope this helps !

The ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template adds some new, very useful features which are built on top of SimpleMembership. These changes add some great features, like a much simpler and extensible membership API and support for OAuth. However, the new account management features require SimpleMembership and won't work against existing ASP.NET Membership Providers. I'll start with a summary of top things you need to know, then dig into a lot more detail.

Summary:

• SimpleMembership has been designed as a replacement for the previous ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system
• SimpleMembership solves common problems developers ran into with the Membership provider system and was designed for modern user / membership / storage need
• SimpleMembership integrates with the previous membership system, but you can't use a MembershipProvider with SimpleMembership
• The new ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template AccountController requires SimpleMembership and is not compatible with previous MembershipProviders
• You can continue to use existing ASP.NET Role and Membership providers in ASP.NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4 - just not with the ASP.NET MVC 4 AccountController
• The existing ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system remains supported, as it is part of the ASP.NET core
• ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms does not use SimpleMembership; it implements OAuth on top of ASP.NET Membership
• The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) is not compatible with SimpleMembership

The following is the result of a few conversations with Erik Porter (PM for ASP.NET MVC) to make sure I had some the overall details straight, combined with a lot of time digging around in ILSpy and Visual Studio's assembly browsing tools.

SimpleMembership: The future of membership for ASP.NET
The ASP.NET Membership system was introduced with ASP.NET 2.0 back in 2005. It was designed to solve common site membership requirements at the time, which generally involved username / password based registration and profile storage in SQL Server. It was designed with a few extensibility mechanisms - notably a provider system (which allowed you override some specifics like backing storage) and the ability to store additional profile information (although the additional  profile information was packed into a single column which usually required access through the API). While it's sometimes frustrating to work with, it's held up for seven years - probably since it handles the main use case (username / password based membership in a SQL Server database) smoothly and can be adapted to most other needs (again, often frustrating, but it can work).

The ASP.NET Web Pages and WebMatrix efforts allowed the team an opportunity to take a new look at a lot of things - e.g. the Razor syntax started with ASP.NET Web Pages, not ASP.NET MVC. The ASP.NET Web Pages team designed SimpleMembership to (wait for it) simplify the task of dealing with membership. As Matthew Osborn said in his post Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages:
With the introduction of ASP.NET WebPages and the WebMatrix stack our team has really be focusing on making things simpler for the developer. Based on a lot of customer feedback one of the areas that we wanted to improve was the built in security in ASP.NET. So with this release we took that time to create a new built in (and default for ASP.NET WebPages) security provider. I say provider because the new stuff is still built on the existing ASP.NET framework. So what do we call this new hotness that we have created? Well, none other than SimpleMembership. SimpleMembership is an umbrella term for both SimpleMembership and SimpleRoles.

Part of simplifying membership involved fixing some common problems with ASP.NET Membership.

Problems with ASP.NET Membership
ASP.NET Membership was very obviously designed around a set of assumptions:

• Users and user information would most likely be stored in a full SQL Server database or in Active Directory
• User and profile information would be optimized around a set of common attributes (UserName, Password, IsApproved, CreationDate, Comment, Role membership...) and other user profile information would be accessed through a profile provider

Some problems fall out of these assumptions.
Requires Full SQL Server for default case
The default, and most fully featured providers ASP.NET Membership providers (SQL Membership Provider, SQL Role Provider, SQL Profile Provider) require full SQL Server. They depend on stored procedure support, and they rely on SQL Server cache dependencies, they depend on agents for clean up and maintenance. So the main SQL Server based providers don't work well on SQL Server CE, won't work out of the box on SQL Azure, etc.

Custom Membership Providers have to work with a SQL-Server-centric API
If you want to work with another database or other membership storage system, you need to to inherit from the provider base classes and override a bunch of methods which are tightly focused on storing a MembershipUser in a relational database. It can be done (and you can often find pretty good ones that have already been written), but it's a good amount of work and often leaves you with ugly code that has a bunch of System.NotImplementedException fun since there are a lot of methods that just don't apply.

Designed around a specific view of users, roles and profilesThe existing providers are focused on traditional membership - a user has a username and a password, some specific roles on the site (e.g. administrator, premium user), and may have some additional "nice to have" optional information that can be accessed via an API in your application.
This doesn't fit well with some modern usage patterns:

• In OAuth and OpenID, the user doesn't have a password
• Often these kinds of scenarios map better to user claims or rights instead of monolithic user roles
• For many sites, profile or other non-traditional information is very important and needs to come from somewhere other than an API call that maps to a database blob

What would work a lot better here is a system in which you were able to define your users, rights, and other attributes however you wanted and the membership system worked with your model - not the other way around.

Requires specific schema, overflow in blob columns

Update: This schema has been improved a lot with Universal Providers. The views and stored procedures have been removed, and the tables are simplified.

SimpleMembership as a better membership system
As you might have guessed, SimpleMembership was designed to address the above problems.
Then we point SimpleMemberhip at that table with a one-liner:
WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseFile("SecurityDemo.sdf", "Users", "UserID", "Username", true);

Broaden database support to the whole SQL Server family
While SimpleMembership is not database agnostic, it works across the SQL Server family. It continues to support full SQL Server, but it also works with SQL Azure, SQL Server CE, SQL Server Express, and LocalDB. Everything's implemented as SQL calls rather than requiring stored procedures, views, agents, and change notifications.

Note that SimpleMembership still requires some flavor of SQL Server - it won't work with MySQL, NoSQL databases, etc. You can take a look at the code in WebMatrix.WebData.dll using a tool like ILSpy if you'd like to see why - there are places where SQL Server specific SQL statements are being executed, especially when creating and initializing tables. It seems like you might be able to work with another database if you created the tables separately, but I haven't tried it and it's not supported at this point.

Easy to with Entity Framework Code First
The problem with with ASP.NET Membership's system for storing additional account information is that it's the gate keeper. That means you're stuck with its schema and accessing profile information through its API.

SimpleMembership flips that around by allowing you to use any table as a user store. That means you're in control of the user profile information, and you can access it however you'd like - it's just data. Let's look at a practical based on the AccountModel.cs class in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project. Here I'm adding a Birthday property to the UserProfile class.

How SimpleMembership integrates with ASP.NET MembershipOkay, enough sales pitch (and hopefully background) on why things have changed. How does this affect you? Let's start with a diagram to show the relationship (note: I've simplified by removing a few classes to show the important relationships):
So SimpleMembershipProvider is an implementaiton of an ExtendedMembershipProvider, which inherits from MembershipProvider and adds some other account / OAuth related things. Here's what ExtendedMembershipProvider adds to MembershipProvider:

Membership in the ASP.NET 4.5 project template
ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms took a different approach which builds off ASP.NET Membership. Instead of using the WebMatrix security assemblies, Web Forms uses Microsoft.AspNet.Membership.OpenAuth assembly. I'm no expert on this, but from a bit of time in ILSpy and Visual Studio's (very pretty) dependency graphs, this uses a Membership Adapter to save OAuth data into an EF managed database while still running on top of ASP.NET Membership.

How does this fit in with Universal Providers (System.Web.Providers)?
Just to summarize:

• Universal Providers are intended for cases where you have an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider and you want to use it with another SQL Server database backend (other than SQL Server). It doesn't require agents to handle expired session cleanup and other background tasks, it piggybacks these tasks on other calls.
• Universal Providers are not really, strictly speaking, universal - at least to my way of thinking. They only work with databases in the SQL Server family.
• Universal Providers do not work with Simple Membership.
• The Universal Providers packages include some web config transforms which you would normally want when you're using them.

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We will be go through the key HTML editor features introduced in ASP.NET 4.5. Automatic Renaming of the matching tag. In ASP.NET 4.5, we have a very productive feature where matching tags are automatically renamed when we change the opening tag.

Consider the following code in HTML side

Now in earlier versions of ASP.NET if I had to make a change in the starting tag then I had to manually update the end tag too. However, with ASP.NET 4.5, you will see that if you update the starting tag then the end tag will also update automatically.

Please see the following image for more details.

Extract to User Control

The ASP.NET 4.5 desiners have developed a very unique and productive feature where at any point of time, we can change code present in a web form to a user control.
Consider I have a web form containing TextBoxes for userName and Password for authentication. While working on this page, we found that we need this user name and password authentication in various modules of the project.

With this said, ASP.NET 4.5 provides us the great feature where we must simply select the code and we can change that selected code to a User Control; see:

Smart Task in HTML Editor

One of the productive features added to ASP.NET a few years back was the addition of a smart task. On the click of the smart available on the control, you can accomplish some of the common tasks on that control.

Now with ASP.NET 4.5, we have the same feature while working on the HTML side. Hence, we don't need to go to design mode to use this feature.

If you click on the line present under "a" , this would open up the smart task for that control.

You will see that you can perform all the common tasks for that control.

Code Snippets in HTML

With ASP.NET 4.5, we have code snippets available in HTML. If you want to add audio or video to you page then you simply must type video on HTML and press TAB twice. You will see that full audio / video control is available, mentioning all the common properties.

Event Handler generation

Before the release of ASP.NET 4.5, if we must create any event handler for any control then we either must double-click on that control, that will generate an event for that control or define the event in the properties of that control. However, with ASP.NET 4.56 we have a new property added in the control, where we can generate an event for the control at the HTML side and we don't need to switch to design mode.

Clicking on "Create New Event" will create a default event for that control; however we can provide any name of that event and you would see that Visual Studio will then automatically generate the appropriate server side event handler within your code behind file for you.

Hope this article of mine has been helpful in giving some knowledge of the new features of ASP.NET 4.5.

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In this post, we will consume the service from a .NET client and a web page.

Consuming Web API OData using a .NET client:

A Web API OData service can be consumed using WCF Data Services client. If you gave already worked with WCF Data Services, you already know about consuming Web API OData Service as well.

Right click on a .NET project and choose the option Add Service Reference. In the dialog, enter the OData service URL and click the Go button.

The dialog parses the metadata received from the server and shows the available entities under container as shown in the screenshot. As we created just one entity in the service, we see the entity Employee alone. Name the namespace as you wish and hit OK. Visual Studio generates some classes for the client application based on the metadata.

The generated code contains the following:

• A Container class, which is responsible for communicating with the service. It holds DataServiceQuery<TEntity> type properties for each EntitySet on the server
• A class for every entity type. This class contains all properties mapped on the server, information about key of the entity

A Container is much like a DbContext in Entity Framework. It handles all the operations. Container is responsible for building OData URLs and sending requests to the service for any operation that client asks for. Let’s start by creating a Container. Constructor of the container accepts a URI, which is base address of the Web API OData service.

Container container = new Container(new Uri("http://localhost:1908/odata"));

To fetch details of all employees, we need to invoke the Corresponding DataServiceQuery property.

var employees = container.Employees;

Although the statement looks like an in-memory operation, it generates the corresponding URL internally and calls the server. Similarly, to get details of an employee with a given Id, we can write a LINQ query as shown:

var employee = container.Employees.Where(e => e.Id == 3).FirstOrDefault();

The above query makes a call to the Get method accepting key in the Web API Controller.

To create a new employee, we need to create an object of the Employee class, add it and ask Container to save it. Following snippet demonstrates this:

Employee emp = new Employee() { Id = 0, Name = "Hari", Salary = 10000 };
container.AddToEmployees(emp);
container.SaveChanges();

Performing update is also much similar. The difference is with calling the SaveChanges method.

emp = container.Employees.Where(e => e.Id == 3).FirstOrDefault();
emp.Name = "Stacy";
container.UpdateObject(emp);
container.SaveChanges(SaveChangesOptions.ReplaceOnUpdate);

If SaveChanges is called with SaveChangesOptions.ReplaceOnUpdate, it performs PUT operation on the resource. If SaveChangesOptions.PatchOnUpdate is passed, it performs PATCH operation on the resource.

To delete an entry, we need to pass an object to DeleteObject method and just like earlier cases; we need to call the SaveChanges method on the Container.

container.DeleteObject(container.Employees.Where(e => e.Id == 3).FirstOrDefault());
container.SaveChanges();

Consuming Web API OData using JavaScript client:

To consume the Web API OData service from a web page, the service has to be called using AJAX. The client can send an AJAX request to the URL of the OData service by specifying an HTTP verb to operate on the resource. To make our life easier, let’s use jQuery for AJAX calls.

To get details of all employees, we need to send a GET request to the OData URL. Values of entries in the collection are stored in a property named value in the object received as response. Fetching details of an employee with a given Id also follows similar approach. Following snippet demonstrates this:

$.getJSON(“/odata/Employees”, function(data){
    $.each(data.value, function(){
        //Modify UI accordingly
    });
}); 

$.getJSON(“/odata/Employees(3)”, function(data){
        //Modify UI accordingly
});

To add a new employee, we need to send the new object to $.post along with the URL.

var employee = {
    "Id": 0,
    "Name": “Ravi”,
    "Salary": 10000
}; 

$.post(“/odata/Employees”, employee).done(function(data){
    //Modify UI accordingly
});

Unfortunately, jQuery doesn’t have a shorthand method for PUT. But it is quite easy with $.ajax as well. To perform PUT on the resource, the request should be sent to the specific address with an ID and the modified object should be passed with the request.

var employee = {
    "Id": 3,
    "Name": “Ravi”,
    "Salary": 10000
}; 

$.ajax({
url: "/odata/Employees(" + employee.Id + ")",
       type: "PUT",
       data: employee
});

Building request for DELETE is similar to put, we just don’t need to pass the object.

$.ajax({
url: "/odata/Employees(" + id + ")",
type: "DELETE"
});