ASP.MVC 6 Features - Dynamic Compilation

Dynamic developement is a new feature supported by Visual Studio 2015 which comes in very handy while creating web apps using MVC 6. Whenever we made any change in the server side code, then we needed to stop debugging, compile the code again and runs it again to view the modified the code in action. This is very tedious job if we are try to debug a large application and wanted to make a slight change. The Edit-and-Continue is present while developing desktop apps since ages and with Visual Studio 2015 it's coming to web applications also.

With Visual Studio 2015, you can forget all these, just make the change in the C# code, save it, refresh the browser and voila the change is reflected in the page. This is achieved by make using of the dynamic compilation facility provided by Roslyn to compile the code automatically when we saves the file. One thing to note here is that you should start your session without debugging from Visual Studio by selecting  Start Without Debugging from Debug menu or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + F5

Let's see an example, in this we have two fields in our page but doesn't have any header in the page or title.

So let's make the change while running the application itself. Modified the controller to add a property in the ViewBag to store the title and save the changes. You can see that I have started the session without attaching the debugger and it's an important step if you want to try out this feature

After saving the file go and modify your cshtml to add a new heading to show the title and also set the ViewBag.Title property which is used in your layout page to show the title.

That's all the changes we need to make and now go to the browser and refresh it see the changes in action without doing the compilation manually again.