This is the first in a series of blog posts I’m doing on the upcoming VS 2010 and .NET 4 release.

Today’s post is about an admittedly small, but I still think kind of nice, change coming with ASP.NET 4.0: clean, simple, web.config files. 

You’ll encounter this improvement the first time you do a File->New Project within Visual Studio 2010 and create an empty ASP.NET 4.0 Web application (which is why I thought it might be appropriate to-do as the first post).

Web.config files in .NET 3.0 and 3.5

Over the last few releases, the web.config files within new ASP.NET projects have steadily increased in size. For example: the default web.config file that is added to a new web project in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is now some 126 lines long, and contains everything from tag definitions to definitions of handlers and modules to be included in the ASP.NET HTTP pipeline.

This increase in size is because .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 use the same CLR and machine.config configuration file as those shipped with .NET 2.0 – and simply add and update assemblies in the framework when they are installed.  To avoid the risk of us accidentally overwriting customized settings within the original 2.0 machine.config on the machine, we didn’t register the tag definitions, handlers and modules that shipped with the new ASP.NET functionality that came with the .NET 3.0 and .NET 3.5 versions.  Instead, we defaulted to having new projects register these settings within the application’s local web.config file instead.  This was safer – but caused the web.config files to increase and become more complicated and harder to read.

Web.config files in .NET 4

.NET 4 includes a new version of the CLR, and a new .NET 4 specific machine.config file (which is installed side-by-side with the one used by .NET 2, .NET 3 and .NET 3.5).

The new .NET 4 machine.config file now automatically registers all of the ASP.NET tag sections, handlers and modules that we’ve added over the years, including the functionality for:

• ASP.NET AJAX
• ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• ASP.NET Routing (which can now be used for both ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC)
• ASP.NET Chart Control (which now ships built-into ASP.NET V4)

What this means is that when you create a new “Empty ASP.NET application” project in VS 2010, you’ll find that the new default application-level web.config file is now clean and simple:

The first config section above just tells ASP.NET to enable debugging by default for the application, and indicates the version of .NET that Visual Studio should target when it provides intellisense (VS 2010 supports multi-targeting – and the intellisense within the IDE will automatically vary depending on which version of the framework you are targeting).

The second config section indicates whether to use “integrated” mode when running the ASP.NET application within IIS7 – which controls whether to run ASP.NET HttpModules for all requests within the application or just for the ASP.NET specific URLs.  We enable this by default at the application level web.config file for new applications – since for compatibility reasons the default IIS7 setting registered at the machine-wide is to run modules only for ASP.NET URLs (and not for all requests).

Summary

The simplified web.config file in .NET 4 is an admittedly small change – but I think a nice one nonetheless, and one which makes the default experience when you create a new ASP.NET application a little cleaner and more approachable.

In the posts ahead I’ll be delving into many of the more substantial improvements coming with ASP.NET 4. (as well as a few more of the “small but nice tweaks” coming too)