For a long time now, developers were ready to test drive the newest Visual Studio as portion of the Visual Studio 2013 Preview. Like all good preview, Microsoft was constantly improving it as developers give them feedback, including some enhancements to ASP.NET.

Microsoft recently announced that it was bringing a considerable number of ASP.NET and Web Tools enhancements to its Visual Studio 2013 Preview. The enhancements include a brand new UI, new authentications and updates for MVC 5 and SignalR.

To commence, Microsoft notes that it’s added a “simple UI for creating projects that provide support for multiple ASP.NET frameworks.” Developers would be capable of use different authentication configurations, including individual user accounts, organizational accounts and Windows authentication. They note that each one configurations work the identical across all ASP.NET frameworks.

Speaking of authentication, ASP.NET authentication is now according to the OWIN middleware. It’s portion of what Microsoft calls Project Katana – an effort at the a part of Microsoft to make ASP.NET more flexible to the meet the demands of the open Web. Within the latest update, Project Katana added “an HttpListener-based sever, a self-host API and OwinHost executable for running OWIN applications without needing to create a custom host.”

Microsoft also notes that ASP.NET now supports claims-based authentication. This kind of authentication allows developers to “authorize requests from client applications on your Web APIs using OAuth2 2.0 bearer tokens.”

On a last note, Microsoft has updated ASP.NET MVC 5, Web API 2, Scaffolding and SignalR. There’s nothing all that notable from these updates except a small change that sees MVC projects being standard Web applications now rather than using their very own custom project GUID.

If it’s worthwhile to investigate cross-check the recent Visual Studio 2013 Preview alongside the enhancements being made to ASP.NET, that you may grab the install here.