It feels like yesterday when we released 1.6 release, but 1.7 is now here and available for immediate download.
Before I continue with all the nice things that happened in the last month, there are several community activities I would like you to know about.
To help you keep up with the latest news and events around NativeScript, we’ve started an occasional newsletter. Our first issue will come out very soon. This is the best way to keep up with the most important NativeScript information. You can sign up here.
The second thing I want to share is we recently launched a shiny new Slack Channel! In just a few weeks we’ve got more than 350 NativeScripters! You can now use the Slack channel for community conversations and StackOverflow to get community support. The NativeScript core engineering team will also monitor Stack Overflow.
If you want more information on premium support options like production support, developer support or enterprise support, visit the Professional Services section of the Telerik website.
Now on to the product updates. Here are the major highlights:
I'm very excited to tell you about the NativeScript extension for VS Code. The NativeScript team worked directly with the Microsoft VS Code team, to provide you with a top notch development experience for NativeScript. Our extension works on both Mac and Windows and supports iOS and Android application development.
All NativeScript developers will appreciate having a full debugging capability with NativeScript for VS Code. This means you can inspect variables, set breakpoints (even conditional breakpoints) and step through code execution. Debugging NativeScript applications is so much more powerful and easy with these features. Additionally, for those who use TypeScript, you will enjoy intellisense, refactoring and code navigation support.
To learn more about our Visual Studio Code support and how to actually install the extension please visit this article.
Windows Universal support is one of NativeScript’s most wanted features. I'm very happy to announce that today we’ve open-sourced our work on the NativeScript Runtime for the Universal Windows Platform (UWP)! The repository is available on GitHub along with a minimalistic sample application that you can run:
The application also works on Windows Mobile 10 which expected to go live this month.
Keep in mind, this is the first preview of our work that runs on Windows. This is not production-ready code. We have a long way to go before we can offer the same great experience on Windows Universal (and Windows Mobile 10).
We’ve made this project available to the open source community to solicit feedback and invite collaboration. We aren’t yet in a position to offer an ETA. Stay tuned for more information.
To read more details about our Windows Runtime please read this dedicated blog post.
As you know, we’ve invested heavily in Angular compatibility for NativeScript. NativeScript is, and will be, the best way to write native mobile applications with Angular. We already have a lot of developers using this integration to validate our work.
With the 1.7 release, we are pleased to offer a feature-complete version of our integration with the Angular SDKs. We still have some work to do to fully enable certain UI components in Angular context. These tasks are separate from the Angular SDK integration.
To get started with visit our NativeScript and Angular GitHub repo.
You can start building applications with Angular 2 and NativeScript right now! Keep in mind, the Google Angular 2 bits are still in Beta. If you are developing an application that will soon go to production, perhaps you should stick with just the pure NativeScript APIs for the moment. Keep up to date with the status of Angular 2 at their GitHub repo.
Angular is still a major focus for the NativeScript team. We expect a stable Beta version that could be used in production applications by the end of April.
Here is a list of all the Angular SDK features we have currently enabled in NativeScript.
| Feature |
| Router |
| Events |
| ng-model |
| Lifecycle hooks |
| Components |
| Templates |
| Metadata |
| Data Binding |
| Services |
| Directives |
| Dependency Injection |
| Pipes |
| HTTP |
| Localization (ng2-translate) |
Nathan Walker released an advanced seed for NativeScript projects using Angular. This project shows the real power of our integration with Angular - e.g. reusing the entire non-UI code of the application with web and desktop apps. Think for a moment how powerful it will be to reuse huge portions of your angular code in both a web and mobile context. We consider this project to be a very important milestone for us. Read more about this.
The team released a preview of CSS Animation support. We think this feature is a great way to continue to build on our CSS support and offer animation capabilities. Take a look at this feature and let us know how we can make it better. Please read this article to learn more.
I hope you enjoy working with NativeScript as much as we enjoy implementing the framework.
If you are evaluating the framework and have any questions please ping me on twitter (@ValioStoychev) to help you out.