The Front-End Developer Toolset - Day 4 - 24 days of "Front-end Development with ASP.NET Core, Angular, and Bootstrap"

As the title says, my book doesn't covers just ASP.NET Core, but also other technologies and frameworks that are important for the development of a web site or web app from A to Z. Chapter 2 of my book is called "The Front-End Developer Toolset" and is an overview of the five categories of "tools" needed by a front-end developer.

Today I'm posting an extract from the beginning of the chapter, and is of much lighter reading and less technical then the two posts I wrote over the weekend, which were about the new Web Host builder in ASP.NE Core and the TagHelper syntax for ViewComponents.

  • JavaScript frameworks: These frameworks help you build complex web interfaces by bringing to front-end development the best practices that are typical of server-side systems, like the model-view-controller (MVC) pattern, the model-view-view model (MVVM), dependency injection (DI), routing, and many others.
  • CSS frameworks: Developers are generally bad at making web apps look good and consistent. CSS frameworks provide a set of styles and UI components with which you can build web applications that look as if they were created by professional designers. CSS frameworks also help address the issue of responsive design that adapts to multiple resolutions and screen sizes and can also apply complex animations and transitions.
  • Package managers: Systems are becoming more and more a mix and match of different components, many of which depend on other components. Managing all these dependencies and correct versions would be a nightmare if it wasn’t for package managers.
  • Build systems: If you are coming from a pure .NET background, you probably have used some build systems already, like NAnt or MSBuild. The front-end development world came out with their own build systems, which are made specifi cally for managing the build of front-end systems.
  • Languages: These extend beyond C# or VB.NET. Most of the tools from the previous categories are built and must be used with JavaScript or other domain-specific languages (DSL).

Explanation of these five categories is covered in more details in the second chapter of my upcoming book Front-end Development with ASP.NET Core, Angular, and Bootstrap.

If you want to see more of what is coming, come back tomorrow for more tips.