It's time for another Visual Studio 2015 CTP, and with the CTP 6 release in February 2015 you should find a number of improvements that every web developer will enjoy. In this article we'll review the new features and improvements in ASP.NET 5 and the Visual Studio editor improvements delivered in CTP 6. For a complete list of the ASP.NET 5 runtime improvements check out the release notes on GitHub at https://github.com/aspnet/Home/releases/tag/v1.0.0-beta3.  You can download the new Visual Studio CTP 6 from VisualStudio.com.

New Project Templates

We've organized the New ASP.NET Project dialog a bit. Now, when you want to start a new ASP.NET 5 project, you start by selecting 'File - New Project - Web - ASP.NET Web Application' and the below set of project templates are displayed.
Notice that we have added a grouping for the ASP.NET 4.6 templates that you're probably already familiar with, and the new ASP.NET 5 preview templates. We hope this makes it easier to discern which templates are new in this version and which templates are those you've been working with previously.
The Starter Web template has been updated with information about how to get started building ASP.NET applications that can run on Windows, Linux, and OSX. The home page now shows a bootstrap carousel with information about this and a whole lot more:

The new Web API template is introduced in this release, and it omits all of the extra HTML and razor markup that MVC provides so that you can focus on simply writing a solid API. Start here if you want to build an API with static content, or even as a starting point for your next single-page-application.

Task Runner Explorer

For JavaScript developers and automation of tasks, the task runner explorer has received a design update. We've moved the toolbar from the top to the left side and introduced some new buttons.
The new buttons allow you to refresh the contents of the current file, toggle the force flag when running a task, and toggle the verbose flag for a task. In the sample image, we've enabled verbose reporting for executing the grunt-bower task in a default ASP.NET project.

System References are back

You can now easily add references to system assemblies using the Add References dialog, which will make the appropriate modifications to your project.json file:
We are also hard at work to enable support for adding references to user assemblies for a future preview release. 

ASP.NET Project properties page improvements

Up until now, all changes to the behavior of a project went through manual updates to the content of the project.json file. There were a few items that could be updated using the Visual Studio user interface, but they were the minority. With this update, we have added configuration options to the project properties window that will allow you to configure the application and the debug time experience.