What a year this has been, and now is the time for my yearly review. Work wise my business has been very simple to run and very stable, because I have continued to extend my contract with DI. This may sound boring initially, but the reason this has worked for me is that I get to dive into a lot of technologies especilly around Azure and Visual Studio Team Services. I have been building a greenfield self-service application, for one of the biggest and most influential organisations in the country, while having the hands on the wheel with reguard to tech and design. So although I have not been moving on to new projects as much as I expected I am loving it.

Xplat has been the big topic around ASP.NET 5, but to be honest it does not matter that much for many of us. Sure it is always nice to have options, but if you work in a Microsoft shop or at an enterprise who see them selves as based on Microsoft technologies, then that is not likely to change - and why should it? The good news is that taking the framework and tooling apart to enable these options also brings a more aligned and flexible architecture, that solves some of the issues with eg. build setups that we have today. With that said, xplat is not all that ASP.NET 5 is about.

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With ASP.NET 5 which is currently in Beta 8, Microsoft has launched a new web server named Kestrel, which is of course Open Source. There are a number of reasons they are building Kestrel, but most importantly to provide a cross-platform web server which does not rely on System.Web and a full version of the CLR in order to bootstrap the new execution environment (DNX) and CoreCLR - which was not possible with Helios.

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