OWIN is not Katana is not vNext, or is it?

A lot of people get confused about OWIN and Katana, especially in their relation to vNext. To properly explain the differences between these things, let’s take a step back into the mid 2000s where ASP.NET (WebForms) was starting to see a lot of people moving away from it, towards things like Ruby on Rails. The reason for that being the fact that WebForms was this huge ugly beast, giving developers a bastardized model of the web to work from. WebForms abstracted away much of the “web” part of web development, and gave us things like the now-dreaded ViewState. But WebForms…

MVC.. 4? Already?! Bundling, Minification, what??

If you’ve been following all the cool new stuff coming in MVC 4, you’ve probably heard of the new Bundling & Minification features. They are seperate, but I like to think of them as parallel concerns. And apparently, Microsoft does too! Look familiar? This is what many sites look like, and it actually presents us two opportunities for optimization. To minify, or not and how to minify The practice of shrinking or ‘minifying’ script and stylesheet files has become pretty common lately, and there are many ways of doing so. Most methods involve either running a script during deployment that…