In my previous post I described my desire to revive my web programming skills and tune up to the latest frameworks. The question is: which frameworks, and in
what order?
This is a question that I struggled over for quite a while; checking in with friends with expertise in various aspects of web programming.
I’ve concluded a few things so far:
- You can’t learn everything at once
- You don’t need to learn everything at once
- It is important to leverage what you already know
Given that, I intend, initially to focus on building enough of a back-end to serve my needs both for web applications and for my mobile work.
My second (fun) project will be Angular 2. I spent a few weeks learning TypeScript and I’ll be using that for my Angular 2 programming. (If you don’t know TypeScript and you want to do anything with Angular 2, stop reading this and go learn TypeScript now.)
For the back-end I intend to look at how ASP.NET Core wants you to build RESTful services. For Angular 2, I will go through the Tour of Heroes (again) and then on through the documentation and the Pluralsight courses I mentioned in my previous post.
What I won’t tackle is all the rest of ASP.NET Core, nor Gulp, Grunt, nor any of the related technologies, except to the extent I absolutely need them, and then only as much as I need.
Tooling
The other required bit of work is to choose and learn the editor/IDE. I’ll do my back end work in Visual Studio 2015 because I know it and it is a great environment for ASP.NET Core.
However, my tool of choice for Angular 2 is VS Code. This editor, like Angular 2 is cross platform, and it is very clean, very fast, and nicely familiar. I recommend John Papa’s course on VS Code if you want to come up to speed quickly.
Getting Started
If you are going to create applications in Angular 2 for the Tour of Heroes, or even just for your own tooling around, I highly recommend using the git repository to set up your dev environment. This is all explained, in detail, here.
Briefly, the steps are:
- Create a directory (let’s say my-proj)
- Open a terminal or command window and enter
git clone https://github.com/angular/quickstart my-proj
- change directory to that project, get rid of the existing .git files, and if you want to create a local repository.
- You are ready to go.
I shall report back as I dive deeper.
