Microsoft and Google Are Collaborating On Angular 2

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Owen Williams

Former TNW employee

Owen was a reporter for TNW based in Amsterdam, now a full-time freelance writer and consultant helping technology companies make their word (show all) Owen was a reporter for TNW based in Amsterdam, now a full-time freelance writer and consultant helping technology companies make their words friendlier. In his spare time he codes, writes newsletters and cycles around the city.

If you had told me Microsoft and Google would collaborate on a major JavaScript framework a year ago, I wouldn’t have believed you, but today the company announced the unlikely pairing.

At ng-conf in Salt Lake City, the Angular team announced that it’s been working closely with Microsoft’s TypeScript team to build Angular 2 and converge the TypeScript and AtScript languages.

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that offers additional features but compiles back into plain JavaScript.

Angular is one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks, but version two has been met with disappointment from developers since it offers no migration path from the first version of Angular and brings a number of major changes that require significant re-learning.

Google and Microsoft being able to collaborate on such a large project is great news, however. It shows yet again that Microsoft is slowly opening up and giving back to open source.

➤ Angular 2: Built on TypeScript [MSDN]