Two players, one goal

From the perspective of a fully functional web-based application, we can say that the Web API interface provided with the ASP.NET framework is a programmatic set of server-side handlers used by the server to expose a number of hooks and/or endpoints to a defined request-response message system. This is typically expressed in structured markup languages (XML), language-independent data formats (JSON), or query languages for APIs (GraphQL). As we’ve already said, this is achieved by exposing application programming interfaces (APIs) through HTTP and/or HTTPS protocols via a publicly available web server such as IIS, Node.js, Apache, or NGINX.

Similarly, Angular can be described as a modern, feature-rich, client-side framework that pushes the HTML and ECMAScript’s most advanced features, along with the modern browser’s capabilities, to their full extent by binding the input and/or output parts of an HTML web page into a flexible, reusable, and easily testable model.

Can we combine the back-end strengths of ASP.NET and the front-end capabilities of Angular in order to build a modern, feature-rich, and highly versatile web application?

The answer, in short, is yes. In the following chapters, we’ll see how we can do that by analyzing all the fundamental aspects of a well-written, properly designed, web-based product, and how the latest versions of ASP.NET and/or Angular can be used to handle each one of them. However, before doing all that, it might be very useful to backtrack a bit and spend some valuable time recollecting what’s happened in the last 8 years in the development history of the two frameworks we’re going to use. It will be very useful to understand the main reasons why we’re still giving them full credit, despite the valuable efforts of their ever-growing competitors.