ASP.NET Web API is a solid communications framework, and many applications can benefit from breaking free of IIS by including an embedded ASP.NET Web API server.

Eric Vogel covers how to use the new Web API 2 routing attributes to create a Web service in Part 1 of this series.

Microsoft has released ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 with enhancements for Visual Studio Web Tooling, ASP.NET Web API, Web Forms, MVC, Windows Azure Authentication including support for SignalR.

Earlier this year, at its Build developers conference, Microsoft announced that it was working on a web-based version of its Visual Studio IDE. At the time, Visual Studio Online went into a ...