Angular - Getting Started with Angular and Visual Studio Code

Download and Install

Visual Studio Code (could use Visual Studio also or many other editors)
npm
Angular CLI
Angular Quickstart App

Setup

Open the View -> Interactive Terminal and type npm install to install all the packages specified in packages.json. Files will be put in node_modules which can safely be excluded from source control if desired since it can be rather large.

Running your app

Open the View -> Interactive Terminal and type npm start. This will build, start the web server, and open the browser.

Stopping your app

Go back to the Interactive Terminal and type Control-C and then Y to stop the web server.

Making Changes

If you make changes to the .html files the changes are automatically updated in the browser.

Blocking

Task.Delay()

If you are in an async method and you want to have it wait for a period of time before continuing your first thought might be to use Thread.Sleep(), but this would work the way you may think. Task.Delay() is what you want to use. Sleep just sleeps on the current thread which is the same as the thread that is calling the async method. Having an async method does NOT create threads unless the

Task.Run()

Task.Run() method is used to run a non-async method on another thread (from the thread pool by default). This is essentially just a background thread and has nothing to do with async. However since Task.Run() returns a Task you can await the result. This makes tracking the task and getting the result very easy.

Task.Run() is a good way to run a non-async method from an async method. There is overhead of spinning up an additional thread just to run this non-async code and then we would await the completion of the thread. This overhead is sometimes the only option if there is no async method available to call and all you have is a non-async method to call and you don't have access to change it.