What is the use of ‘Tag Helpers’ in ASP.Net 5?

Microsoft’s ASP.Net latest release aka ASP.Net 5 – aka ASP.Net vNext comes with several advancements and features that help to improve the techniques used for developing modern web applications. With more than 10 years of evolution, this ASP.Net is considered to be the most significant version of ASP.Net till date.

With version 5, ASP.Net, being an open source framework, the developer get the availablity on GitHub, with a cross-platform runtime in the works. Yes, exactly, developers can now to build and run ASP.Net 5 applications on various operating systems such as Windows, Linux, or even Mac OS X. In addition to this exciting facility, ASP.Net 5 brings all sorts of improvements to the developers world that make applications easier to build, easier to configure, and easier to maintain. One such feature is ‘Tag Helpers’.

Tag helper is one of the new features shipped with ASP.Net 5 which enables developers to perform preprocessing of HTML attributes along with server-side content. In essence to that, tag helpers are a pose a new way for developers to enable dynamic rendering feature in ASP.Net. In order to work with tag helpers, the developers need to install the Microsoft ASP.Net MVC (Model View Controller), TagHelpers assembly using NuGet and then have to add it to the developer’s view as @addtaghelper "Microsoft.AspNet.Mvc.TagHelpers".

Following HTML code snippet uses the Tag Helper feature

@model IDG.Models.Magazine

@using (Html.BeginForm())

{

       @Html.LabelFor(m => p.Name of the Author, "Name of the Author:")

       @Html.TextBoxFor(m => p.Name of the Author)