Aurelia CLI - Visual Studio 2017/2019 Tools

@constructor

Any chance to use it by Visual Studio 2019?

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@HamedFathi Yes. This will be the next update. I have to admit that I have not yet installed VS 2019. I like to keep my system as stable and fast as possible.

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Updated as @HamedFathi requested.

Update includes:

  • Update to be Visual Studio 2019 & Visual Studio 2017 compatible
  • Create and save project templates
  • Generate new projects from saved templates
  • Some refactoring and bug fixes

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See above post for download and more information on what is arriving soon..

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I have updated the extension with the following:

  • Both Visual Studio 2017 and 2019 should now work via the same download.
  • There is now a file format check for saved project template files.

There was not much at all required to change in order to enable both versions of Visual Studio to be served from the same extension, only some package conflicts.

See above post for download and more information on what is arriving soon..

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Wow. You are fast with these things. Nice!!

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I have updated the extension with the following:

  • A new Visual Studio Aurelia template with no CLI dependency
  • Very lightweight and fast
  • A few miscellaneous bug fixes

I was aiming for a fast light-weight and transparent template that provides fast performance.

The video shows a new project with very basic navigation, adding pages and other elements followed by publishing to a stand alone self hosting site in a little over 4 mins and 4MB.

See above post for download and more information on what is arriving soon..

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Awesomeee! :laughing:

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An example of something I am looking to automate next. This demonstrates going from an empty folder to an Aurelia .NET Core MVC project compiled into a docker image and running in a container in 5 minutes.

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@constructor

Is it an open source project?

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@HamedFathi
It is not and never will be commercial project. I have not posted the source as yet because I change things so quickly and fundamentally that it does not make sense to do so. At some stage I will.

From an empty folder to docker in 5 minutes

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One thing that I found that takes the most time when bootstrapping a new project is the mapping of databases to models and forwarding them to the frontend app.

So a bit more food for thought. Since you’re mentioning docker, it would actually be a pretty awesome experience being able to preconfigure the instance with something like PostgresQL and Hasura or being more conservative with Mysql/PostgresQL + Entity Framework. I’m not sure what the current state of the art is but I hope you get the point.

Now with all that in place we have the first step to come to the frontend part. Over here there could be a few possible ways to go. Let’s go first the REST route:

  • Automatically generate model interfaces (obviously for TS)
  • Scaffold a service class for CRUD requests with aurelia-fetch-client + revivers

With that in place, starting new apps would become extremely fast since lots of boilerplate is reduced, and with docker one would get the whole environment shipped as well.

EDIT:
Btw looking at your videos I have to admit that coding this way starts to become cheating as so much is premade out of the box :wink:

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So far the Visual Studio extension and templates I have posted have the intention of getting up and running as quickly and easily as possible. Scaffolding from data is something I am definitely looking at, though there are a couple of other things first.

What tools like this attempt to do is enable all developers (experienced and novice alike) to get to a certain stage with little or no fuss. For the experienced developer it helps by cutting out configuration and boilerplate, for those less experienced they can get to the same place quickly and begin the process of learning.

I do not believe that there is any such thing as cheating, just an attempt at improved productivity, removal of tedium and a kick-start for those wishing to learn. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Dont get me wrong this was meant in a very positive way. Great work

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It’s fine, no problem. :slightly_smiling_face:

From an empty folder to docker in 5 minutes

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This is really good… I played with it in VS2019 however cant seem to get the drop down menus working… (wanted to see if you could have multiple levels of menus - as I need them). I am a beginner here so its harder to find context etc. I note that I have to change to …/App to get the menus to show for the Aurelia app and that the top menu is spun out from VS… - two menus… Is it possible to just have the nav menu from the Aurelia app show at the top where the VS menu is as default… I suspect this is low on the agenda but it would make it easier to spin out a website etc with just the pages in the SRC…

Anyway from what I have seen its excellent.

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WOW, just awesome :muscle: Do you know how could we make one like this for Visual Studio for Mac?

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The navigation renderer should be as simple as adding to a page. Check the videos above it has examples of multi-level also, you just create a folder with the same name as a page and everything created inside that folder is parsed and rendered as a child.
If there is any error of problem please report it back and I can take a look, but it should be as simple as in the videos above.
Also, check this for the case sensitive route issue:

I am awaiting info on this unfortunate limitation in Aurelia.

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I will take a look but my immediate understanding his that this will be not a simple task. Of course it may be possible but I think it would be a new development rather than a making compatibility changes. I have very little Mac experience and none in Mac VS.

There is an undisclosed tool that will help with site generation in development, but IDE context menus for VS Mac are a different thing altogether.

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It’s quite cool - it has forced me to have a closer look to the various configuration files to understand how it is working (the webpack middleware compiling the project to the dist folder using the aurelia-webpack-plugin using the webpack.config.js…) . I have setted up unit test with jest (I get tsc compile errors till i find the TypeScriptCompileBlocked option in the csproj and a message from the blog teaching how to set a specific tsconfig for the ts-loader un webpack) but unfortunatly there is no jest test plugin for VS, I think it could be nice to have a try with jasmine / chutzpa or to build one using the chutzpa code, did you already have a try with this ?
Thanks for your work!

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Can you post a git repo that show this? I am not clear on what the issue is.

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