Web API

Web API will be extended to enable richer OData functionality, expand support for Windows Store Apps and enable simple tracing and monitoring. In addition, the template will be updated to use the new functionality.

• OData – Rich OData query support will be brought back using the new OData URI parser. Developers will be able to control OData query semantics. OData endpoints can be implemented over any data source using the new OData formatter, metadata controller, and modeling capabilities.
• Windows Store Support – Client side support for Windows Store Apps will be expanded. In addition to HttpClient class there will be support for using Web API formatters.
• Tracing – Developers and administrators need the ability to monitor and diagnose issues with Web API based services. Web API gives developers and administrators visibility into web APIs including simple tracing and support for integrated logging using System.Diagnostics, ETW, NLog and Log4Net.
• Help Page – Web API help page generation will make it easy to generate rich, web-based documentation for your web APIs including the resource URIs, allowed HTTP verbs, expected parameters, and sample message payloads.

Web Optimization

The Web optimization framework was first released with Visual Studio 2012 and provides optimization features such as bundling and minifying JavaScript and CSS at runtime. The next release will include the following new optimization features:

• Support for custom virtual path providers
• CDN fallback expressions
• Templates for link and script tags rendered by the helper methods
• Build time support for bundling and minification