The new enhanced default project template came up with modern looking. Along with some cosmetic enhancements, it also employs new adaptive rendering to look nice in both desktop and mobile browsers without need of any kind of additional customization.
Yes, we can still develop the RESTful services with WCF, but there are two main reasons that prompt users to use Web API instead of RESTful services.
ASP.NET Web API is included in ASP.NET MVC which obviously increases TDD (Test Data Driven) approach in the development of RESTful services.
For developing RESTful services in WCF you still needs lot of config settings, URI templates, contract’s & endpoints which developing RESTful services using web API is simple.
View can be changed automatically based on browser(For mobile and desktop browser’s)
Display Modes is newly added feature in ASP.NET MVC @Views selected automatically by application depending on the browser. Example: If a desktop browser requests login page of an application it will return ViewsAccountLogin.cshtml view & if a mobile browser requests home page it will return ViewsAccountLogin.mobile.cshtml view.
There is major difference is on implementation mechanism between ASP.NET MVC 3 and ASP.NET MVC 4.
In ASP.NET MVC 3, to implement async controller or methods we need to derive controller from AsyncController rather than from normal plain Controller class. We need to create 2 action methods rather than one. First with suffix ‘Async’ keyword & second with ‘Completed’ suffix.
In ASP.NET MVC 4 you need not to declare 2 action method. One can serve the purpouse. MVC 4 using .Net Framework 4.5 support for asynchronous communication.
Routing changes: ASP.NET Web API uses same convention for config mapping that ASP.NET MVC provides.
Model Binding & Validation: ASP.NET Web API uses same model binding functionality, but HTTP specific context related operations only.
Filters: The ASP.NET Web API uses most of built-in filters from MVC.
Unit Testing: Now Unit testing based on MVC, strongly unit testable.
Bundling & Minification reduces number of HTTP requests. Bundling & Minification combines individual files into single. Bundled file for CSS & scripts and then it reduce’s overall size by minifying the contents of the bundle.
Yes, MVC 4 is supporting Windows Azure SDK version 1.6 or higher.