Migration Notes: ASP.NET 5 MVC 6 - Beta 6 to Beta 7

Another month, another beta! Here are my release notes to my current team on migrating from Beta6 to Beta7 of ASP.NET MVC 6. There was only one major snag that I ran into, otherwise a smooth transition!

The upgrade to beta 7 has been completed. As with previous beta updates, Visual Studio requires updated tooling, so please grab these:

• DotNetVersionManager-x64.msi
• WebToolsExtensionsVS14

From here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48738

And don’t forget to update your dnvm stuff (ORDER MATTERS):

1. dnvm upgrade -arch x64 -r clr
2. dnvm upgrade -arch x86 -r clr

And a new step, remove all other betas from your user folder:

C:\Users\{YOUR PROFILE}\.dnx\runtimes

The following announcements/issues were relevant to our codebase to some degree:

• Startup Code changes in MVC
• The Kestrel package/namespace has been renamed to Microsoft.AspNet.Server.Kestrel
• IConfiguration API changes and added interfaces (biggest change is you can no longer use Configuration.Get("Your:Key:Name"), instead use the indexer Configuration["Your:Key:Name"]
• Breaking DNX renames

And these are just mindful to be aware of:

• Falling through to IIS now requires opt-in
• dnx now implicitly uses current folder as the appbase
• HTML5 defined elements with URL accepting attributes are now TagHelpers

There was only one issue during the upgrade process; after doing the usual find/replace of -beta6 to -beta7, I ran into this issue:

error CS1703: Multiple assemblies with equivalent identity have been
imported: '<in-memory assembly>' and '<in-memory assembly>'. Remove one of the
duplicate references.

As generic of an issue as that appears to be, I had the idea that it had to do with some of our packages and dependencies. Since we're currently focusing on DNX451, I removed all NuGet package references to the System.* namespace and put them under frameworkAssemblies. So, this:

{
 "dependencies": {
    "AutoMapper": "4.0.4",
    "MaxMind.GeoIP2": "2.3.1",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Caching.Memory": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Configuration": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Configuration.EnvironmentVariables": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Configuration.Json": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Configuration.UserSecrets": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Logging": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "System.Data.SqlClient": "4.0.0-beta-22816",
    "System.Diagnostics.TraceSource": "4.0.0-beta-22816",
    "System.Text.RegularExpressions": "4.0.10-beta-22816",
    "System.Threading.Tasks": "4.0.10-beta-22816",
    "WindowsAzure.Storage": "5.0.2",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Caching.Memory": "1.0.0-beta7"
  },
  "frameworks": {
    "dnx451": {
    }
}

Became this:

{
 "dependencies": {
    "AutoMapper": "4.0.4",
    "MaxMind.GeoIP2": "2.3.1",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Caching.Memory": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Configuration": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Configuration.EnvironmentVariables": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Configuration.Json": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Configuration.UserSecrets": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "Microsoft.Framework.Logging": "1.0.0-beta7",
    "WindowsAzure.Storage": "5.0.2"
 },
 "frameworks": {
    "dnx451": {
    "frameworkAssemblies": {
    "System": "4.0.0.0",
    "System.Data": "4.0.0.0",
    "System.Data.Linq": "4.0.0.0",
    "System.Collections": "4.0.0.0"
    }
 }
}

So from here forward, be mindful of where your package references get auto-added.

Thank you,

-Brandon