Highlights From Angular’s NG-Conf 2016

I just finished up the first day of ng-conf 2016 and as usual, it has been a great informative conference. Thanks to the organizers, sponsors, and Angular team members for all your efforts. Here are some highlights from today: Brad Green’s keynote address, of course, covered the big picture of the Angular development work. The…

Using Redux to Manage Angular2 Application State

In this post, I want to focus on managing application state. In the example application, I tried to create an application that had a reasonably complex user interface (“complex” is relative here, of course). The user interface needed to show where changes in one area of the page had immediate impact on other areas. If…

Submit Your Bot to Microsoft’s Directory

Bots are the future, Microsoft proclaimed at this year’s Build conference, and now the company is inviting developers to submit their own for inclusion in a publicly-available bot directory. In an email to developers cited on Windows Central, Microsoft said it was seeking submissions of chat bots made using its open-source Bot Framework. The Framework, announced…

Yes, I Used jQuery in My Angular2 Application

An astute observer has probably noticed that I’m using jQuery in my Angular2 example application. “The horror! Revoke his Angular2 license now!!” I’m in no way saying this is a best practice or even a good practice. Including jQuery is not required or even desirable for most Angular2 applications. Angular1 had a dependency on jQuery…

Container and Presentation Components in Angular2

Angular2 has a strong emphasis on components. An application is made up of a tree of components, starting from the root component and working down to child components. This helps to organize your application into logical and manageable pieces. Complex user interface can be broken down into smaller components, assembling them together, to better organize…

Big Ideas Behind Angular2

When I first started using AngularJS (way back in version 0.8, I believe), I was continually impressed at what it could do. The team I was working with at the time had many discussions on how this young framework could be used effectively within our project. We found ourselves experimenting with different techniques and slowly…

NPM Will Make it Harder to Unpublish Code After Left-Pad Fiasco

NPM, the JavaScript package manager, says it will update its policies after one developer’s removal of 11 lines of code crashed a chunk of the internet earlier this week. Thousands of software projects, including the popular Babel and React, broke down when developer Azer Koçulu yanked all his code from NPM following a dispute with…

Windows 10 IoT Core Now Supports Raspberry Pi 3

With the newest edition of Raspberry Pi now on the market, Microsoft has announced that it’s rolling out IoT Core support for the device, expanding the options for developers working on IoT projects. The $35 Raspberry Pi 3 board went on sale Feb. 29, and support is available via the most recent IoT Core Insider…

Microsoft Scraps Android-to-Windows Bridge, Tells Developers to Use Xamarin Instead

It’s official: Project Astoria, Microsoft’s effort to create a bridge for porting over Android apps to Windows 10, is no more. Just one day after announcing its acquisition of multiplatform app development company Xamarin, Microsoft released an update to developers on the company’s bridge projects, which reads in part: “We…decided that we would focus our…

Microsoft Buys Xamarin, Bets on a Cross-Platform Future

The past year has seen Microsoft take a number of strides towards realizing CEO Satya Nadella’s “cloud-first, mobile-first” vision. Once laser-focused on its own devices and operating systems, the company is increasingly platform-agnostic: It wants business customers and developers to use its cloud-based software, no matter what OS they prefer. On Wednesday, Microsoft took those…

Windows Store Algorithm Updated to Improve App Visibility

Frustrated that your app doesn’t show up easily in Windows Store? Microsoft says it’s taking some steps to update the algorithm that decides which apps appear in search results. The algorithm “has been adjusted to give more weight to app quality signals such as the number of downloads and ratings,” according to a Microsoft blog post.…