Summary

So far, so good; we've just set up a working skeleton of what's about to come. Before moving on, let's do a quick recap of what we just did (and learned) in this chapter.

We briefly described our platforms of choice – ASP.NET and Angular – and acknowledged their combined potential in the process of building a modern web application. We spent some valuable time recalling what's happened in these last few years and summarizing the efforts of both development teams to reboot and improve their respective frameworks. These recaps were very useful to enumerate and understand the main reasons why we're still using them over their ever-growing competitors.

Right after that, we did our best to understand the differences between the various approaches that can be adopted to create web apps nowadays: SPAs, MPAs, and PWAs. We also explained that, since we'll be using .NET and Angular, we'll stick to the SPA approach, but we'll also implement most PWA features, such as service workers and web manifest files. In an attempt to reproduce a realistic production-case scenario, we also went through the most common SPA features, first from a technical point of view, and then putting ourselves in the shoes of a typical product owner while trying to enumerate their expectations.

Last, but not least, we learned how to properly set up our development environment; we chose to do that using the latest Angular SPA template shipped with the .NET SDK, thus adopting the standard ASP.NET Core/.NET 5 approach. We created our app using the .NET CLI and then tested it on Visual Studio to ensure it was working properly.

In the next chapter, we'll take an extensive look at the sample app we just created in order to properly understand how the .NET back-end and the Angular front-end perform their respective tasks and what they can do together.