Angular Addicts #22: Angular 17.1, Signal Inputs, State management tips & more

👋Hey fellow Angular Addict

This is the 22nd issue of the Angular Addicts Newsletter, a monthly collection of carefully selected Angular resources that got my attention. (Here are the 21st, 20th and 19th issues.)

📢Release announcements

📢What's new in Angular 17.1?

The latest minor version of Angular, was released this month. Cédric Exbrayat summarizes the most important new features in his blog post:

• Support for TypeScript 5.3
• Inputs as Signals
• Zoneless change detection (new private API)
• Router: new info option in NavigationExtras
• Control flow migration
• Angular CLI improvements

💎Angular Gems of January, 2024

📰11 friends of state management in Angular

Alexander Goncharuk suggests 11 rules to follow with "Avoid" and "Prefer" code snippets and detailed explanations:

• Use dedicated tools for state management
• Always prefer local state unless you have a good reason to use global state
• Limit component code to view-related logic only
• Always separate stateful and stateless services
• Access state synchronously when it makes sense
• Do not create "proxy methods" for no good reason
• Remember to use multicasting observables returned by selectors
• Use state management APIs, but do not limit yourself to them
• Embrace pure functions and static methods
• Make sure you handle errors in effects

📰Derivations in Reactivity

Ryan Carniato takes a deep dive into the theory behind reactive systems, highlighting the distinctions between derivation and synchronization. He addresses the challenges of ensuring glitch-free consistency during state updates, and compares three approaches to reactivity: scheduling (pull), events (push) and signals (push-pull).

📰Testing Angular’s Latest Features

In his article, Rainer Hahnekamp covers testing techniques for the latest features of Angular:

• How to mock services in a standalone component
• How can we use TestBed.runInInjectionContext() for unit testing code that uses the inject() function
• Utilizing RouterTestingHarness to simplify the unit test of the routed components

📰Angular Signal Inputs

One of the most interesting new features of Angular 17.1 is Signal Inputs. Kevin Kreuzer highlights the benefits of reactive inputs and the differences between the computed signals and the transform property of Signal Inputs. He also explains how required inputs and input aliasing work, demonstrates how to utilize router parameters with Signal Inputs and offers a simple method to trigger side effects when input changes occur.

👨‍💻About the author

My name is Gergely Szerovay, I work as a frontend development chapter lead. Teaching (and learning) Angular is one of my passions. I consume content related to Angular on a daily basis — articles, podcasts, conference talks, you name it.

I created the Angular Addict Newsletter so that I can send you the best resources I come across each month. Whether you are a seasoned Angular Addict or a beginner, I got you covered.

Next to the newsletter, I also have a publication called — you guessed it — Angular Addicts. It is a collection of the resources I find most informative and interesting. Let me know if you would like to be included as a writer.

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🕹️Previous issues

If you missed the previous issues of the newsletter, you can read them here, these are the latest 3 issues:

• Angular Addicts #21: signal stores, router unit testing & more
• Angular Addicts #20: unit testing the new defer blocks, NGRX Signal store extensions, app architectures & more
• Angular Addicts #19: Angular 17, NX 17, Storybook 7.5 & more

📨 Submit your Angular resource

Have you found or written an interesting Angular-related article, tweet or other resource lately? Please let me know here in the comments or send me a DM on Twitter! I might feature it in the next Angular Addicts issue!