What is new in ASP.NET Core 2.0 Preview

At Build 2017, Microsoft announced ASP.NET Core 2.0 Preview 1.
This blog post is about new features of ASP.NET Core 2.0 Preview.

1. ASP.NET Core meta-package
ASP.NET Core meta-package that includes all features that you need to build an application. Developer no need to pick and choose individual ASP.NET Core features in separate packages as all features are now included in a Microsoft.AspNetCore.All package in the default templates. If there are features you don’t need in your application, our new package trimming features will exclude those binaries in your published application output by default.

2. Simplified Host Configuration

A new default Web Host configuration, codifying the typical defaults of the web host with the WebHost.CreateDefaultBuilder() API. This adds Kestrel, IIS configuration, default configuration sources, logging providers, and the content root.

public class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        BuildWebHost(args).Run();
    }

    public static IWebHost BuildWebHost(string[] args) =>
        WebHost.CreateDefaultBuilder(args)
            .UseStartup()
            .Build();
}

3. @page Directive
Create pages without controllers in ASP.NET Core with the new RazorPages capabilities.  Just create a Pages folder and drop in a cshtml file with the new @page directive to get started.

4. Cloud Debugging 
Debugging your application in the cloud is easier than ever with integrated Azure Application Insights and diagnostics when debugging in Visual Studio and after deploying to Azure App Service.

5. Authentication 
- A newly revamped authentication model that makes it easy to configure authentication for your application using DI.

- New templates for configuring authentication for your web apps and web APIs using Azure AD B2C

- New support in ASP.NET Core Identity for providing identity as a service. Updated templates decouple your apps from their identity concerns standard protocols (OpenID Connect, OAuth 2.0). Easily migrate apps using ASP.NET Core Identity for authentication to use Azure AD B2C or any other OpenID Connect compliant identity provider.

- Build secure web APIs using ASP.NET Core Identity. Acquire access tokens for accessing your web APIs using the Microsoft Authentication Library (MSAL)

For a full list of changes see the release notes.

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