Yesterday was the first day at ngconf 2016 with great announcements for Angular 2 and a lot of great talks all available for you to see and enjoy right now on youtube.

I thought it would be nice to write a quick summary with some bullet points including the most interesting announcements from the keynote in case you don’t have 1 hour free to watch it yourself but can invest 2 minutes in reading an article.

Angular 2 moves from a framework to help you write web applications into a platform with a wider scope. Where it not only focus on building apps but also on the entire ecosystem surrounding the framework itsef:

• It improves on all the familiar elements existing from Angular 1 with a faster dependency injection model and change tracking (10x).
• The Angular 2 team has worked together with other teams like Ember to bring improvements to the JavaScript ecosystem in the form of decorators and zones.
• The Angular 2 compiler and renderer have been greatly improved. The renderer follows a pluggable architecture and can render Angular applications not only in the brower but also within a server or a web worker.
• The Angular 2 team is working on other libraries that will help you build complete real world applications like Angular 2 Material for styling. They are also working with other teams to bring Angular 2 to mobile and making it as easier as possible to build universal apps with Angular 2 that can work seamlessly in both front-end and backed. Rendering Angular 2 apps in the backend will help you with SEO and in getting a super fast first page rendering to the user.
• They have also invested in developer productivity with the Angular 2 CLI that will help you setup and work with Angular 2 apps in the blink of an eye. They have worked with partners to bring excellent Angular 2 support to all IDEs and a great new Chrome plugin to help you debug Angular 2 apps in the brower.
• They have also work in a way for you to move from Angular 1 to Angular 2 as fast as possible. ngUpgrade let’s your Angular 1 application coexist with Angular 2 and gives you access to some of the newest Angular 2 APIs from Angular 1.

Additionally:

• Angular moves from beta into Release Candidate and is now in version rc.1
• Rendering in Angular 2 is now 5 times faster than it was in Angular 1
• The current distribution of Angular 2 is 4 times smaller (at 45KB) that it was just a week ago, and even smaller than Angular 1. It will continue getting smaller and smaller.
• Angular 2 lets you do server side rendering with Angular Universal. It is supported right now in node.js and ASP.net and it will extend to other server side plaforms in the future.
• Angular 2 works seamlessly with web workers and let’s you offload much of the work done by an Angular 2 application into web workers.
• Augury is the new Chrome plugin that will give you great insights into your Angular 2 application.
• Angular 2 offers a much simpler API where a ton of custom directives have been replaced by property and event bindings.
• Angular 2 has an official style guide to help you succeed when building Angular 2 apps. You can use codelyzer, an open source library, to include these style guide rules as part of your TypeScript linting process.
• Setting up an Angular 2 app from scratch can be pretty daunting, that’s why the new Angular 2 CLI it’s going to be a great help. Instead of setting everything by hand, you’ll be able to create a new Angular 2 app with ng new myApp and work further with it with other cli commands like ng generate, ng server, etc, very in the spirit of yeoman or ember cli.
• The Angular 2 team wants you be successful using Angular 2 to build mobile applications and they announced the Angular Mobile Toolkit a set of tools that will help you build progressive web apps with Angular 2.
• They have also been working with partners to bring Angular 2 to mobile in different flavors with different degrees of native-ness: Ionic, NativeScript and React Native.
• Angular 2 also works great to build desktop apps using electron.
• They are working super hard on Angular 2 Material but in the meantime you can take advantages of partner libraries like wijmo.

Wo! Tons of stuff righ?! If you are interested in learning more there’s a ton of talks that you can start watching on youtube.

Have a great day!