Last week I passed the 70-486 certification exam yippie!. I gathered a bunch of notes and references while I was studying for the exam that you are welcome to use if you are planning to do it yourself.

If you are also interested in knowing about the process I used to prepare for the exam take a look at How I passed the 70-480 Certification Exam where I describe it (since I did the same things to prepare both exams).

Last week I watched a very interesting Pluralsight webinar where Joe Eames introduced Angular 2 and I wanted to share what I learned from it with you.

A couple (or four) weeks ago Angular 2 went into developer preview with a beautiful brand new documentation and distributions that you can start playing with today. I hadn’t even looked at it to be honest, busy with other stuff, but I had kept my ear out for news and when pluralsight announced a webinar on the topic I thought it was the perfect time to find out more.

This is what I learned:

Angular 2 is in a very early stage of the developer preview, very unstable and it is constantly changing not only in the form and shape of the API but also in its core concepts and naming.

With Angular 2 you get everything you know and love from Angular 1 with a highly improved performance, a simpler mental model with fewer moving pieces and better access to the DOM.

You can build Angular 2 applications in plain ES5 JavaScript but you also have the option to use transpilers and write your angular 2 apps with TypeScript, ES6/ES7 (traceur, babel…), CoffeeScript, etc.

The whole development story changes from using a standard MVC approach to a more componetized development where you have independent components and each has its template and underlying view model (like in aurelia). The components themselves are just ES6 classes that expose APIs to be bound to templates (no more $scope variable).

Angular 2 uses ES7 decorators to provide metadata to your components. They work sort of like attributes in C#. If you use ES5 to write your angular apps there’s alternative APIs to define this metadata. This is an example of a component from Joe Eames’ code sample on GitHub that can give you an idea about how the new component model looks like:

// ES 6 module imports
import { Component, View, For, If, EventEmitter } from 'angular2/angular2'
import { Inject, bind } from 'angular2/di'
import { todoItems } from 'services/todoItems'

// component metadata (element and dependencies to inject)
@Component({
  selector: 'todo-list',
  injectables: [bind('todoItems').toValue(todoItems)],
})
// view metadata (template and used directives)
@View({
  templateUrl: 'components/todo-list.html',
  directives: [For, If],
})
// an ES6 class
export class TodoList {
  constructor(@Inject('todoItems') todoItems) {
    this.items = todoItems
  }
  setCompleted(item, checked) {
    item.completed = checked
  }
  completeAll() {
    var that = this
    this.items.forEach(function(item) {
      that.setCompleted(item, true)
    })
  }
  removeItem(item) {
    this.items.splice(this.items.indexOf(item), 1)
  }
}

There is some interesting new notation for writing bindings within the html templates (*for instead of ng-repeat, *if instead of ng-if, binding with [attribute] and (event):

<div style="margin-bottom:10px">
    <h1>To Do</h1>
    <div style="padding:5px" *for="var item of items">
            <input type="checkbox" #chkbox [checked]="item.completed" (click)="setCompleted(item, chkbox.value)">
            {{item.text}} <a class="glyphicon glyphicon-remove" (click)="removeItem(item)"></a>
    </div>  
    <button *if="items.length > 1" class="btn btn-xs btn-warning" (click)="completeAll()">Complete All</button>
</div>

The IoC story looks like is more explicit and less convention-over-configuration based although I have no clue how it will look in the final version:

// extract from previous example with IoC fragments
@Component({
  injectables: [bind('todoItems').toValue(todoItems) ]
})
// an ES6 class
export class TodoList {
  constructor(@Inject('todoItems') todoItems) {
        this.items = todoItems;
    }
//...

You can start testing the developer preview by downloading the source code at code.angularjs.org (look for the 2.0.x and alphas). In terms of good editor support, there is sublime text that has great plugins for ES6 and ES7, Web Storm, and even Visual Studio Code or Visual Studio if you want to try Angular 2 with TypeScript.

Watch the full webinar with much more interesting information and examplesin youtube:

And here you have the announcement of Angular 2 at ng-conf 2015:

I don’t know why people were so jumpy about breaking changes, this is looking gooood! Hope you enyojed the article! Have a nice day! :)

References

For more information about Angular 2 take a look at:

• The new Angular 2 website
• Learn Angular 2 in 5 minutes
• Joe eames’ Angular 2 code example
• Joe eames’ Angular 2 Overview on Youtube
• Angular 2 built on TypeScript
• The ng-conf 2015 playlist
• The source code for AngularJS2
• And these other resources

Barbaric Tip of the Week is a weekly series whose main purpose is to share tiny bits of knowledge that I find specially useful and interesting.

I started my machine, opened the command line, ran vim and opened my weekly planning, project notes and overall work checklist as I usually do, in the exact window configuration that I usually use, which my weekly planning window on the left, and job checklist and project notes stacked on the right. Everything was the exactly the same as the previous 999 times, everything but for one thing, this time a thought sprang to my mind: Wouldn’t it be awesome if I could save this file/window configuration and just load it at all once?

Well… That was about time… there is indeed a way to do that… :)

You can save your complete session in vim, that is, the files you have opened with the specific windows or tab configurations that you’re using, with the :mksession command:

:mksession ~/jobsession.vim

Later, the next time you open vim you can load that session with :source:

:source ~/jobsession.vim

Or alternatively open vim directly with a specific session by using the -S option:

PS> gvim -S ~/jobsession.vim

Voilá! Enjoy!

Bonus tip: Did you know that you can also resize windows with the :resize command? You can use :vertical resize <numberOfLines> to resize a window’s width, and :resize <numberOfLines> to resize its height. Cool right?