dotnet vs angular cli

Question

I have been going through many Angular 2/4 tutorials in hopes to gather enough confidence to commit to building a project. Most of them use Angular cli to generate a starter

Answer 1

Using Visual Studio and the Angular templates to create an Angular app is hard. I tried it, plugged away at it for days, and ended up moving to Angular CLI.

The "hello world" stuff works OK through Visual Studio but when you try to get a bit more sophisticated it soon starts falling down. Trying to debug errors etc is hard, 3rd party modules dont work properly...

I would highly recommend using Angular CLI, command prompt, VS Code and Chrome debugger to develop your front-end. Keep Visual Studio for what its good at these days: building your .Net Core back-end. You will also find the Angular community can help you a lot more readily if they don't have to elimintate Visual Studio from every problem.

For what its worth the resulting websites produced by both options you are considering would perform roughly the same. After all its pretty much the same source code and the same compilers you are comparing.

Answer 2

A bit of time has passed since your question was asked, but as an FYI to people visiting this question that Microsoft recently updated the template to be CLI-friendly.

Instructions on how to add the template are here: https://github.com/aspnet/JavaScriptServices/issues/1288#issuecomment-346003334

As of writing, the most recent version of the Microsoft.DotNet.Web.Spa.ProjectTemplates package is 2.0.0-rc1-final.