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Using Angular with Visual Studio 2015
{@a top}
Some developers prefer Visual Studio as their Integrated Development Environment (IDE).
This cookbook describes the steps required to set up and use Angular app files in Visual Studio 2015 within an ASP.NET 4.x project.
There is no live example for this cookbook because it describes Visual Studio, not
the Angular application itself. It uses the starter Angular application created by the CLI command ng new
as an example.
{@a asp-net-4}
ASP.NET 4.x Project
To set up the Getting Started files with an ASP.NET 4.x project in Visual Studio 2015, follow these steps:
If you prefer a File | New Project
experience and are using ASP.NET Core,
then consider the experimental
ASP.NET Core + Angular template for Visual Studio 2015.
Note that the resulting code does not map to the docs. Adjust accordingly.
Prerequisite: Node.js
Install Node.js® and npm if they are not already on your machine. See Local Environment Setup for supported versions and instructions.
Prerequisite: Visual Studio 2015 Update 3
The minimum requirement for developing Angular applications with Visual Studio is Update 3.
Earlier versions do not follow the best practices for developing applications with TypeScript.
To view your version of Visual Studio 2015, go to Help | About Visual Studio
.
If you don't have it, install Visual Studio 2015 Update 3.
Or use Tools | Extensions and Updates
to update to Update 3 directly from Visual Studio 2015.
Prerequisite: Configure External Web tools
Configure Visual Studio to use the global external web tools instead of the tools that ship with Visual Studio:
- Open the Options dialog with
Tools
|Options
. - In the tree on the left, select
Projects and Solutions
|External Web Tools
. - On the right, move the
$(PATH)
entry above the$(DevEnvDir
) entries. This tells Visual Studio to use the external tools (such as npm) found in the global path before using its own version of the external tools. - Click OK to close the dialog.
- Restart Visual Studio for this change to take effect.
Visual Studio now looks first for external tools in the current workspace and if it doesn't find them, it looks in the global path. If Visual Studio doesn't find them in either location, it will use its own versions of the tools.
Prerequisite: Install TypeScript for Visual Studio 2015
While Visual Studio Update 3 ships with TypeScript support out of the box, it currently doesn’t ship with TypeScript 3.1, which you need to develop Angular applications.
To install TypeScript 3.1:
-
Download and install TypeScript 3.1 for Visual Studio 2015,
-
OR install it with npm:
npm install -g typescript@3.1
.
You can find out more about TypeScript 3.1 support in Visual Studio here.
At this point, Visual Studio is ready. It’s a good idea to close Visual Studio and restart it to make sure everything is clean.
Step 1: Create a starter Angular app
Follow the instructions in Local Environment Setup to create a starter Angular app using the CLI command ng new
.
Step 2: Create the Visual Studio ASP.NET project
Create the ASP.NET 4.x project in the usual way as follows:
- In Visual Studio, select
File
|New
|Project
from the menu. - In the template tree, select
Templates
|Visual C#
(orVisual Basic
) |Web
. - Select the
ASP.NET Web Application
template, give the project a name, and click OK. - Select the desired ASP.NET 4.5.2 template and click OK.
This cookbook uses the Empty
template with no added folders,
no authentication, and no hosting. Pick the template and options appropriate for your project.
Step 3: Copy the Angular project files into the ASP.NET project folder
Copy files from the starter Angular app into the folder containing the .csproj
file.
Include the files in the Visual Studio project as follows:
-
Click the
Show All Files
button in Solution Explorer to reveal all of the hidden files in the project. -
Right-click on each folder/file to be included in the project and select
Include in Project
. Minimally, include the following folder/files:- src/app folder (answer No if asked to search for TypeScript Typings)
- src/styles.css
- src/index.html
- package.json
- src/tsconfig.json
Step 4: Restore the required packages
Restore the packages required for an Angular application as follows:
- Right-click on the
package.json
file in Solution Explorer and selectRestore Packages
.
This usesnpm
to install all of the packages defined in thepackage.json
file. It may take some time. - If desired, open the Output window (
View
|Output
) to watch the npm commands execute. - Ignore the warnings.
- When the restore is finished, a message in the bottom message bar of Visual Studio
should say:
Installing packages complete
. Be patient. This could take a while. - Click the
Refresh
icon in Solution Explorer. - Do not include the
node_modules
folder in the project. Let it be a hidden project folder.
Step 5: Build and run the app
First, ensure that src/index.html
is set as the start page.
Right-click index.html
in Solution Explorer and select option Set As Start Page
.
To run in VS with F5
Most Visual Studio developers like to press the F5 key and see the IIS server come up. To use the IIS server with the Getting Started app, you must make the following three changes.
- In
index.html
, change base href from<base href="/">
to<base href="/src/">
. - Also in
index.html
, change the scripts to use/node_modules
with a slash instead ofnode_modules
without the slash. - In
src/systemjs.config.js
, near the top of the file, change the npmpath
to/node_modules/
with a slash.
After these changes, npm start
no longer works.
You must choose to configure either for F5 with IIS or for npm start
with the lite-server.
For apps that use routing
If your app uses routing, you need to teach the server to always return
index.html
when the user asks for an HTML page
for reasons explained in the Deployment guide.
Everything seems fine while you move about within the app. But you'll see the problem right away if you refresh the browser or paste a link to an app page (called a "deep link") into the browser address bar.
You'll most likely get a 404 - Page Not Found response from the server
for any address other than /
or /index.html
.
You have to configure the server to return index.html
for requests to these "unknown" pages.
The lite-server
development server does out-of-the-box.
If you've switched over to F5 and IIS, you have to configure IIS to do it.
This section walks through the steps to adapt the Getting Started application.
Configure IIS rewrite rules
Visual Studio ships with IIS Express, which has the rewrite module baked in. However, if you're using regular IIS you'll have to install the rewrite module.
Tell Visual Studio how to handle requests for route app pages by adding these
rewrite rules near the bottom of the web.config
:
The match url, <match url=".*" />
, will rewrite every request. You'll have to adjust this if
you want some requests to get through, such as web API requests.
The URL in <action type="Rewrite" url="/src/"/>
should
match the base href in index.html
.
Build and launch the app with debugger by clicking the Run button or by pressing F5
.
It's faster to run without the debugger by pressing Ctrl-F5
.
The default browser opens and displays the Getting Started sample application.
Try editing any of the project files. Save and refresh the browser to see the changes.