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by darrelmiller 4997 days ago
Web API is actually built on a completely different HTTP pipeline than ASP.NET products. When it moved to the ASP.NET team, there were a number of changes made to make it feel more natural to ASP.NET devs. Hence the slight variations when you dig under the covers. The question we need to ask ourselves, is why would the ASP.NET team agree to continue to support a completely new HTTP pipeline.
2 comments
michielvoo 4997 days ago
Because unlike ASP.NET it can be self-hosted [1]. It wouldn't surprise me if ASP.NET was moved onto System.Web.Http in the future. Because ever since ASP.NET MVC they have been trying to hide the old System.Web under the new System.Web.Abstractions to support unit testing.

1. http://www.asp.net/web-api/overview/hosting-aspnet-web-api/s...

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MatthewPhillips 4997 days ago
Implementation details. To the person using the products, they are nearly identical, with one being for web sites and one being for APIs. I see no reason why these should be separate. Please explain.
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tugberk 4996 days ago
ASP.NET MVC is approx. 3 years old product and to support the features of the current ASP.NET Web API in an elegant way, lots of breaking changes would occur in ASP.NET MVC. This is just one of the reasons. You might also see this one as another impl. detail but it is the brutal truth.

Gleen Block has a 20 minutes long video on this topic if you need more info: http://www.tugberkugurlu.com/archive/why-do-i-need-asp-net-w...

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MatthewPhillips 4996 days ago
What features? The difference between MVC and Web API, to those using it, is that Web API uses restful routing and MVC does not. That is all.
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tugberk 4983 days ago
It's pretty impressive to see people who have no idea about the technology they are talking about. ASP.NET Web API doesn't force REST at all! Go learn what that FX does in the first place before leaving comments like this.
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