I'm killing the SPFx Angular Boilerplate... And it's a good thing!
A bit of background
I’ve been working in the last few months to understand better the integration possibilities between Angular and the famous SharePoint Framework and I had a lot of fun discovering this landscape! I’ve been building some kind of a workaround with the help of some resources being made available by Microsoft a couple of months ago (funny story, I’m writing this blog post at the exact same coffee shop in a suburb of Montreal where that journey started 10 months ago) and I’ve been touring with a session to show that it was indeed possible to play with Angular and SharePoint, even though I was not recommending it for anyone who wanted to push that code to production. It was more a proof of concept than a future-proof approach. We had great conversations with Andrew Connell, Waldek Mastykarz, Marc D. Anderson and even a couple of debates with Sahil Malik. Even though it was a great learning resource (especially for anyone wanting to try out Angular in a SharePoint context), this solution had to die, some day…
The killing part
Today, I’m killing it (that’s my Christmas gift to you!). I’m now not recommending this approach anymore. What does it mean for you? Well, I already archived my GitHub repository, which means I won’t push any new code to it and I won’t accept any new PR, new issues, etc. But then, I know some of you have been building amazing solutions with that foundation! It doesn’t mean that your code will stop working! It will continue to work the same way it did last week or last month. What it really means is that time has come to look at new Angular opportunities that will make all of that much more performant and supportable…
Introducing Angular Elements
I will not re-introduce what AC already did in his amazing blog post called Solve the SharePoint Framework + Angular Challenge with Angular 5.0 Elements. What I will do is that in the next couple of days, I will introduce you to some cool code gems that will help you to take advantage of that approach and how it can benefit to you own Angular solutions within the SharePoint Framework!
Free resources!
For now, you can have a look at those free resources available online that will make it easier to learn what Angular Elements have to offer for us, Enterprise Developers!
- Rob Wormald Angular Elements Repository on GitHub
- Angular Elements — Your ngComponents Everywhere
- The Angular Team at AngularMix
- Reference implementation for SPFx using preview capabilities available from Angular Elements
Conclusion
Stay tune for more blog posts on using Angular Elements within the SharePoint Framework in the next couple of days… It’s gonna blow your mind! Happy Angular Elementing!
