Over the past couple of years, my most popular talk that Iv’e taken around user groups has been the one where I describe what Typescript is, and how it relates to the backend C# developer.
Iv’e found that many back-end devs who would like to jump into client side development, are often put off from doing so simply beacuse of the percieved mess that the JavaScript eco system is in at present, and let’s be fair it’s not a compleatly unfounded reason either, beacuse JavaScript is bleeding at the edges in a great many places.
My latest incarnation of this talk (As of the date I write this post) was Tuesday the 10th July 2018 at Duke Studios in Leeds, for the Hainton Recruitment groups, most recent .NET developers UG event.
This time around, as well as getting asked if I could provide the slides, I also got asked if I could recomend some further self teaching resources too, as most of what had been looked at, was now either quite far out of date, or just not relevent anymore.
My primary learning tool when I first got to know and started to use TS, was the online playground, where in real time you can experiment with TS code, and watch the exact JS code it will produce, you can find that here:
http://www.typescriptlang.org/play/index.html
Iv’e also always found that the documentation is also of a very high standard compared to some projects Iv’e seen, you can read the docs here:
http://www.typescriptlang.org/docs/home.html
Finally for online resources, Basarat Ali Syed (http://www.basarat.com/) has made his world famous TS guide book available for free via Git-Books here:
https://basarat.gitbooks.io/typescript/content/docs/getting-started.html
The Typescript community is now extremely large, as a result there are a great number of books available on the subject, some of the better ones Iv’e seen are the Packt and Apress books aimed at beginners (CLick the pictures for the product page):
The books themselves are aimed squarely at the beginner Typescript dev, and are not aimed at the C# developer, but the language is so easy to get to grips with, you almost don’t need any guides esp if your used to C#
For those who would like a copy of the slides from my talk, you can grab a copy from this blog here:
https://shawtyds.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/typescript-talk.pdf
At some of the talks I also do a quick demo of some TS code generated by the dotnet SPA templates, but not the regular ones, the templates I use are the ones Steve Sanderson published for his info on using the NuGet JavaScript SPA services.
The really quick way to get started with this is as follows:
1) Install the latest dotnet core runtimes/sdk on the machine your using, you may also need to install a recent build of NodeJS too if you do not have an up to date one.
2) Once dotnet core is working, at your command line type : dotnet new –install Microsoft.AspNetCore.SpaTemplates::*
3) Once you have the templates installed (You only need to do steps 1/2 once), at your command line create yourself a folder to work in, move into that folder and type : dotnet new aurelia
Once dotnet has finished scaffolding your app, then you should only need to type “npm install” to make sure you have all the javascript stuff required, although at this point you can actually load the project into Visual Studio or VS-Code, either of which should actually do the NPM and dotnet package restore steps for you.
When Time permits, I’m actually going to write a series of articles going through the creation of an Aurelia app from start to finish, based on this template, so keep an eye out for those.
Finally, before I go, my session at Leeds didn’t get recorded, however, the version of the talk I did at Developer, Developer, Developer Scotland in Febuary 2018 did, if you want to watch that version, then you can watch it on you tube right here:
Hainton recruitment have asked me if I’ll do this same session in the near future at thier next Newcastle-upon-tyne, event, keep an eye on my Twitter and Linked-In profiles for the details of the date if you want to come along.
Shawty
