I need to get any ideas of how i should be managing our previous asp.net MVC 5.2 web application.. now i am using asp.net mvc-5.2 with entity framework 6.0. and i want to start phase-2 for some of these projects. so should i consider upgrading my mvc 5.2 to be using mvc6 (vnext) first ? and will there be any migration plans ? second question , when is it expected for vnext to be released? or it is has been officially released ?
third question, will i be able to create a vnext project inside VS 2012 ?
I would simply recommend following the standard best practice of n-tier architecture and keeping logic related to things like querying a database in class libraries. MVC 6 is drastically different from previous versions, so there's no easy migration. You'll basically need to start a brand new project and move over relevant code where you can and spend a good bit of time converting code. For example, child actions are gone and have been replaced with view components. You'll need to go through any child actions you're using currently and create view components out of them. As I said, making sure your current MVC project is as thin as possible (by factoring out code into class libraries and such) will go a long way in reducing the amount of code you need to move/change.
As far as I'm aware, no release date has been set, but at least in the alpha and beta phases of Visual Studio 2015 and ASP.NET 5/MVC 6, Windows 10 has been required, so there won't be an official release likely until Windows 10 is public. However, Visual Studio 2015 has reached release cadidate stage, so I'd say it's definitely close, either launching alongside Windows 10 or shortly after.
Kind of answered this in point 2, but ASP.NET 5/MVC 6 will require VS2015. As far as I'm aware, there's no plans to add support to lesser versions. A lot of that has to do with Rosyln, the new .NET compiler. Trying to bootstrap previous versions of VS with support for an entirely new compiler/syntax engine would be a monstrous task. However, VS has been on an MSDN subscription model for many versions now and as long as you're a current subscriber you can always download the latest version for free. If you're not an MSDN subscriber, you can still download the community edition of VS 2015 for free. It's missing a lot of the more advanced VS features, but it's still totally sufficient for web development work.