I listen to .NET Rocks! to keep up with what’s going on with .NET development. The episodes are about 50 minutes each, and are very well done; however, there are occasions when I’d just like to know the highlights. If I have the time, I may go back and listen to the whole conversation and dig deeper. Therefore, I’m trying a TL;DL (too long, didn’t listen) format here on my blog.
It dawned on me that providing summaries for shows I’m already listening to could be a way to give back to the community. (The shows used to have transcripts, but I think with three shows a week, their production staff probably could not realistically keep up.) We’ll see where this goes!
Show link: .NET Rocks! 1366: Angular 2 Docs with Ward Bell
Guest: Ward Bell
Show Notes
- https://angular.io/docs/; in GitHub
- Angular contracted with IdeaBlade (Bell’s company); he wanted the docs to be written by devs, not just tech writers.
- Why move from Angular 1? Angular 2 went final on Sept 14, 2016; it uses semantic versioning. Some things aren’t as mature (i.e., tool chain), but this will be fully released soon. There is a lot of real-world experience building with Angular 2.
- Angular 2 has less ceremony; it’s very tool-able, so others will create those tools so that you have to write less code.
- Why can you trust these docs? Premise: They are rich in samples that will always work with the latest version. Every chapter has a full working sample. There are tests that run those samples, which are part of the approval chain for Angular itself.
- The docs have a short set of simple guides if you know nothing; then, you can transition to long-form docs as you dig deeper. There’s a cookbook for helping you solving very specific problems.
- How is Visual Studio’s integration with Angular 2? Improving all the time; VS Update 3 will get over some of the hurdles; it’s a point of great interest between Google and Microsoft. Several of IdeaBlade’s clients use VS (or VS Code), ASP.NET, Angular 2, and TypeScript just fine. There are different environments for non-Microsoft devs than those accustomed to working in a graphical IDE such as VS.
- The premise of Angular is that there are modular pieces (e.g., router, dependency injection) to help you build a web app. It is an opinionated framework, but you can replace any of the pieces if you choose.
- The documentation is generated automatically based on examples; see Plunker.
- How many people are working on the documentation? About 30 people; contributions are welcome at all kinds of levels (e.g., typos, phrasing).
- What surprised you? Seeing an app with a total size of 25KB. There is a drive to run on mobile devices with low bandwidth; compilation (not transpiling) and optimizations are done ahead of time rather than in the browser on the fly, and you don’t ship the compiler down into the browser. You can use “tree shaking” to eliminate unneeded code.
- Google has a business interest to have websites that run well on mobile; everybody benefits from a smaller, faster framework.
- Did you model this after anything in particular? Grace of interaction is important; the focus is on delivering accurate (up-to-the-minute) documentation; Rob Eisenberg’s documentation on Aurelia was also mentioned.
- Who’s writing the samples? Whoever writes the text writes the sample. The docs have a standard style/theme, and linters are involved; all work is reviewed via pull requests.
- Who else reviews the docs? There’s a small group to ensure responsibility; the author needs to be passionate about what they’re writing about (most of the time the author has struggled with a particular topic anyway).
- Dan Wahlin and John Papa are other Angular resources.
- There’s integration with BreezeJS in Angular 2.
Better Know a Framework
Polly for transient exception/error handling according to policies is now in the .NET Foundation.
Listener E-mail
From show #1339 (Angular 2 CLI); recommends using the Angular 2 Quick Start Guide and having the Chrome dev tools open.
Technology Giveaway Idea
Royal Dutch Gazelle (electric bicycle)