Angular 7 came out in October 2018 and it definitely was a major update, as we can easily guess by reading the words written by Stephen Fluin, developer relations lead at Google and prominent Angular spokesman, on the official Angular development blog upon the official release:
"This is a major release spanning the entire platform, including the core framework, Angular Material, and the CLI with synchronized major versions. This release contains new features for our toolchain, and has enabled several major partner launches."
Here's a list of the new features:
- Easy upgrade: Thanks to the groundwork made with version 6, the Angular team was able to reduce the steps that need to be done to upgrade an existing Angular app from an older version to the most recent one. The detailed procedure can be viewed by visiting https://update.angular.io, an incredibly useful Angular upgrade interactive guide that can be used to quickly recover the required steps, such as CLI commands, package updates, and so on. This needs to be done to upgrade an existing Angular app from an older version of Angular to a most recent one.
- CLI update: A new command that attempts to automatically upgrade the Angular application and its dependencies by following the procedure mentioned previously.
- CLI prompts: The Angular command-line interface has been modified to prompt users when running common commands such as ng new or ng add @angular/material to help developers discover built-in features such as routing, SCSS support, and so on.
- Angular Material and CDK: Additional UI elements such as virtual scrolling, a Component that loads and unloads elements from the DOM based on the visible parts of a list, making it possible to build very fast experiences for users with very large scrollable lists, CDK-native drag-and-drop support, improved drop-down list elements, and more.
- Partner launches: Improved compatibility with a number of third-party community projects such as: Angular Console; a downloadable console for starting and running Angular projects on your local machine, AngularFire, the official Angular package for Firebase integration, Angular for NativeScript; an integration between Angular and NativeScript – a framework for building native iOS and Android apps using JavaScript and/or JS-based client frameworks, some interesting new Angular-specific features for StackBlitz; an online IDE that can be used to create Angular and React projects, such as a tabbed editor and an integration with the Angular Language Service, and so on.
- Updated dependencies: Added support for TypeScript 3.1, RxJS 6.3, and Node 10, although the previous versions can still be used for backward compatibility.
The Angular Language Service is a way to get completions, errors, hints, and navigation inside Angular templates: think about it as a virtuous mix between a syntax highlighter, IntelliSense, and a real-time syntax error checker. Before Angular 7, which added the support for StackBlitz, such a feature was only available for Visual Studio Code and WebStorm.
For additional information about the Angular Language Service, take a look at the following URL:
https://angular.io/guide/language-service
For additional information about the Angular Language Service, take a look at the following URL:
https://angular.io/guide/language-service