16 June 2014

Announcing my upcoming book "Learning AngularJS for .NET developers"

UPDATE: The book was launched on 25/07/2014 and it has a free chapter "Testing and debugging AngularJS applications" that is described here.

My blog was a bit quiet in the past 6 months and I had a good reason for this. Since February I am working on a book called "Learning AngularJS for .NET developers" covering the intersection between AngularJS, ServiceStack, ASP.NET MVC and ... Node.js.
The book is an expansion of my previous blog post Using AngularJS with ServiceStack while keeping ASP.NET MVC in the background and is a concentrated introduction for building single page web applications with AngularJS and .NET.
The content is divided in three main sections:
  • An introduction to AngularJS the popular JavaScript MVC framework originally designed to develop testable web applications faster. This section finishes with building a sample client side application in Visual Studio;
  • A section about creating web services using ServiceStack. It highlights features that make this process very efficient with minimal code required;
  • A final section about integrating AngularJS, ServiceStack, ASP.NET MVC and securing the sample application. The section continues with adding data persistence support with the micro-ORM ServiceStack.OrmLite framework. There is a chapter on testing where I can use Node.js to test the AngularJS application thanks to the recent beta release of "Node.js Tools for Visual Studio". I am using Karma and Protractor with Jasmine to define and run the JavaScript and end to end tests. For .NET integration and unit tests I am using the xBehave.net BDD test framework. The section end with a chapter on advanced topics like internationalisation, using animations and working with remote web services.
The book is focused on a modern web development workflow meant to improve developer productivity within the context of Visual Studio. This workflow should give you great results when integrating AngularJS with .NET web applications and one of its highlights is the integration with Node.js based test runners for user interface tests.
All the examples from this book do not require a commercial license for Visual Studio or for any of the frameworks or libraries that were used. The minimum requirement is the free Visual Studio 2013 Express for Web that supports "Node.js Tools for Visual Studio" and Web Essentials 2013.
I provided some of the AngularJS examples on plnkr.co/tags/angularjs-dotnet-book and all the examples from this book are on GitHub so anyone can clone the book examples repositories. The examples are split in two repositories:

1 comment:

jonwinterbourn said...

Good work Alex - I've pre-ordered and very much looking forward to reading the whole thing having seen chunks in development...
Hope the book goes well