I am excited to announce that a documentary has been made about TypeScript! It premiered on YouTube at 5pm British Summertime September 21st 2023.
I had the good fortune to be involved in the making of the documentary. In part this was thanks to my work on Definitely Typed. Another reason was my work on recording the history of DefinitelyTyped.
You can see it on YouTube here or hit play on the embedded video above. Thanks to the Keyboard Stories team for making this happen!
A new feature arrives with TypeScript 5.1, it is described as "Decoupled Type-Checking Between JSX Elements and JSX Tag Types".
It's all about handing control of JSX type definitions to libraries. With this feature, libraries can control what types are used for JSX elements. Why does this matter? Great question! Until version 5.1, TypeScript did an imperfect job of representing what is possible with JSX. This feature allows libraries to do a better job of that, and we'll look into it in this post.
It's probably worth saying, that this is a complicated feature. If you don't understand it (and as the author of this post I'll confess that I had to work quite hard to understand it), that is okay. This is a low level feature that is only likely to be used by library / type definition authors. It's a primitive that will unlock possibilites for people writing JSX - but it's something that people will mainly feel the benefit of, without directly doing anything themselves, or necessarily noticing that things have changed for the better.
I really like type imports that are unambiguous. For this reason, I've made use of the "importsNotUsedAsValues": "error" option in tsconfig.json for a while now. This option has been deprecated in TypeScript 5.0.0, and will be removed in TypeScript 5.5.0. This post will look at what you can do instead.
I wrote previously about how to implement a dynamic redirect mechanism for Azure Static Web Apps using Azure Functions. I implemented this using JSDoc JavaScript. I've since migrated this to TypeScript and I thought it would be interesting to share the process.
I've wanted to take a look at some of the alternative JavaScript runtimes for a while. The thing that has held me back is npm compatibility. I want to be able to run my code in a runtime that isn't Node.js and still be able to use npm packages. I've been using ts-node for a long time now; it's what I reach for when I'm building any kind of console app. In this post I want to port a console app from ts-node to Bun and see how easy it is.
Support for Node.js 16 for Azure Pipelines custom pipelines task extensions has arrived. From a TypeScript perspective, this post documents how to migrate from a Node.js 10 custom task to one that runs on Node 16 using azure-pipelines-task-lib.
The React useState hook is a great way to persist state inside the context of a component in React. This post demonstrates a simple React hook that stores state in the URL querystring, building on top of React Routers useSearchParams hook.
Logs matter. In Azure, logs generally live in Application Insights, in the Transaction Search section. This post reverse engineers the Azure Application Insights Transactions URL, and details how to construct a link to take you directly there, using both TypeScript and C#.
As part of the TypeScript 4.7 release comes a major upgrade to ECMAScript Module Support for Node.js. This post takes a look at what that means.
The upgrade of the React type definitions to support React 18 involved some significant breaking changes. This post digs into that and examines what the upgrade path looks like.
Recently, a new ECMAScript proposal called "Type Annotations" (originally named "Types as Comments") was revealed. The purpose is to allow type annotations to be valid JavaScript syntax. Albeit syntax that is ignored by JavaScript engines. The proposal is being worked on by Gil Tayar, Daniel Rosenwasser, Romulo Cintra, Rob Palmer, and others. Many of these people are from TypeScript community - however this proposal intentionally does not exist to benefit TypeScript alone.
There's a debate to be had about whether using JavaScript or TypeScript leads to better outcomes when building a project. The introduction of using JSDoc annotations to type a JavaScript codebase introduces a new dynamic to this discussion. This post will investigate what that looks like, and come to an (opinionated) conclusion.
Google has a wealth of APIs which we can interact with. At the time of writing, there's more than two hundred available; including YouTube, Google Calendar and GMail (alongside many others). To integrate with these APIs, it's necessary to authenticate and then use that credential with the API. This post will take you through how to do just that using TypeScript. It will also demonstrate how to use one of those APIs: the Google Calendar API.
An exciting feature is shipping with TypeScript 4.4. It has the name "Control Flow Analysis of Aliased Conditions" which is quite a mouthful. This post unpacks what this feature is, and demonstrates the contribution it makes to improving the readability of code.
TypeScript has the ability to define classes as abstract. This means they cannot be instantiated directly, only non-abstract subclasses can be. Let's take a look at what this means when it comes to constructor usage.
React 18 alpha has been released; but can we use it with TypeScript? The answer is "yes", but you need to do a couple of things to make that happen. This post will show you what to do.
The Service Now REST API is an API which allows you to interact with Service Now. It produces different shaped results based upon the sysparm_display_value query parameter. This post looks at how we can model these API results with TypeScripts conditional types. The aim being to minimise repetition whilst remaining strongly typed. This post is specifically about the Service Now API, but the principles around conditional type usage are generally applicable.
ts-loader has just released v9.0.0. This post goes through what this release is all about, and what it took to ship this version. For intrigue, it includes a brief scamper into my mental health along the way. Some upgrades go smoothly - this one had some hiccups. But we'll get into that.
This post documents how to migrate a blog from Blogger to Docusaurus.
