The Internet remains a critical focus for modern application development. When its popularity began to skyrocket in the 1990s, the focus was on users who usually accessed the Internet via their web browsers and e-mail clients. The proliferation of devices beyond a traditional desktop computer (smart phones, tablets, dedicated gaming consoles, and more) in the 21st century has brought about the current situation where users expect to be able to access their data from anywhere on any device.

As developers, we need to support as many of these devices as we can to provide the best user experience. Users on a desktop expect a full-featured application that takes advantage of the larger screen and the typical peripherals (keyboard, mouse, and so on), whereas mobile users expect a touch-centric application that is sensitive to bandwidth limitations.

Web development in VS2015 has been further improved to support all of these use cases. Whether you are writing client-facing code or the server technology to support them, VS2015 has improved the tools available to you. And while the focus of this chapter is that of Internet-facing applications, many familiar languages that originated for the Web (HTML5 and JavaScript) have found a place across the full spectrum of application development, so you will be able to use them to write code for websites, UWP apps, or desktop applications.

In this chapter, we will look at different areas where VS2015 can help make your web development tasks easier for wherever you are putting these technologies to use.