How Does Full Stack Web Development Stack Up?

Full stack web developers are in great demand with attractive salaries being dangled from job search sites.

Is this job for you?

If you've heard about this employment category and are intrigued by the possibilities, you still might want to look before you leap.

To start with: What exactly are we talking about when we talk about full stack web development?

It is a little like having access to all the rooms in the mansion. As a full stack web developer, you know how to work in the front rooms and the back rooms and you have access to all the connecting hallways and rooms in between.

The upcoming VSLive! in Chicago has a learning experience that is a full track on the full stack. Here's how it's described:

Full Stack Web Development
Web development has become the dominant approach for building enterprise software. To provide your best on every project, you need to understand the server and browser client worlds. On the server there's ASP.NET Core with MVC, the new Razor Pages, and support for building services. The browser client is evolving rapidly, with constant changes and updates to JavaScript, TypeScript, Angular, React, and other related frameworks ...

Topics in this track include:

• ASP.NET Core intro and deep dive
• Getting started with Razor Pages
• Angular 101
• Managing async data in Angular
• Designing advanced Angular components
• Advanced Azure App Services
• Advanced TypeScript

So there you have the components of what you need to know to get started in the full stack world. There's a lot going on in the Microsoft world with ASP.NET Core as well as Azure, Razor, Angular and Typescript. Are you up to date on these core technologies? Here is the latest news.

Can You Say Azure?
Since Oct. 2008 when Microsoft announced its cloud computing service, Azure has been the most mispronounced product name in history. Do a search on how to say Azure and many variations appear. The American pronunciation is said to be a.zhr.  But a lot of computer industry analysts seem bent on outdoing each other in coming up with different ways to say it. Originally, before Microsoft presumably took the name from an RGB color wheel, azure was a variation of the clear blue sky. Maybe that sky had a fluffy white cloud, hence the Microsoft naming logic.

Anyway onward, Microsoft Azure is a big deal in the computing cloud world and full stack web developers need to know about it. Blockchain, which is big news everywhere, was one of the big news previews highlighted this summer at the Microsoft Build developers conference, as Paul Schnackenburg explained in an in-depth Virtualization & Cloud Review article, A Look at the New Azure Releases & Improvements Revealed at Build 2019. There's a preview of Azure Blockchain Service providing point-and-click creation of fully managed networks with management and governance built-in. "There's also an Azure Blockchain Development Kit," he writes, "which brings connectors for Flow and LogicApps, another move to make adoption of this complex technology easier for non-experts. And the plug-in for Visual Studio Code is going to simplify development."

What's New for ASP.NET Core
With .NET Core 3.0 becoming production-ready, Microsoft is focusing on new features for ASP.NET including top level ASP.NET Core templates in Visual Studio: "The ASP.NET Core templates now show up as top level templates in Visual Studio in the 'Create a new project' dialog," Microsoft's Daniel Roth explained in a July Visual Studio Magazine article. What's New for ASP.NET Core offers summaries of the new features.

Working with Razor and Blazor
If you want to start working on the frontend, Visual Studio Magazine offers a handy how-to guide with code samples. In THE PRACTICAL CLIENT: How to Dynamically Build the UI in Blazor Components by Peter Vogel, he explains: "You have two tools for generating your initial UI in a Blazor component: ASP.NET's Razor and Blazor's RenderFragment." He shows how to use both to integrate with your C# code and also offers a caveat about what you can't do.

Angular 8 Grows Ivy
If you are angling for a full stack web developer position, you need to know your Angular. As a Wikipedia article explains: "Angular is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework led by the Angular Team at Google and by a community of individuals and corporations." The latest version, Angular 8, was released this past May but the article notes that Google has promised new upgrades twice a year. The future of Angular is Ivy, which is a "backwards compatible, completely new render engine based on the incremental DOM architecture. Ivy has been engineered with tree shaking in mind, which means that application bundles will only include the parts of Angular source code that is actually used by the application." Angular 8 has an opt-in preview of Ivy with these features:

Generated code that is easier to read and debug at runtime.

• Faster re-build time.
• Improved payload size.
• Improved template type checking.
• Backwards compatibility

As an open source project there are lots of websites for Angular info including https://opensource.google.com/projects/angular, and https://github.com/topics/angular.

Pop Goes the Typescript
"Microsoft created the open source TypeScript language in 2012 and it has climbed steadily in popularity thanks to its unique scheme of providing optional static typing for JavaScript-based coding, among other features," explains David Ramel, editor of Visual Studio Magazine, in a recent article, TypeScript Cracks Top 10 in Programming Language Popularity Ranking. In another article on the latest TypeScript 3.6, the open source project's program manager Daniel Rosenwasser covers the latest features with links so you can take a deep dive into what it all means.

Get on Track for Full Stack
This blog offers a peek at what you need to know to be a full stack web developer. If you want to dive deep, sign up for VSLive! Chicago.

Posted by Richard Seeley on 08/27/2019