Getting started with TypeScript 1.0

Yesterday evening I did an Introduction to TypeScript at CRineta. I agreed to do it on short notice, so I scrambled to pull the talk together over the weekend. Much of this version of the talk was based on Anders Hejlsberg’s Build 2014 talk. And of course I used the resources from typescriptlang.org along with TypeScript in Visual Studio. I’ve had a small amount of TypeScript code in production for about 6 months, but I’m going to start converting more now that 1.0 is released.

What is TypeScript?

Typescript implements a set of language constructs that gives a better compile time experience, it allows you to manage large JavaScript applications better and it provides optional static types. Some of these features are classes, modules, interfaces, enumerations, generics and optional static types.

“TypeScript is a free and open source programming language developed by Microsoft. It is a strict superset of JavaScript, and adds optional static typing and class-based object-oriented programming to the language.” – Wikipedia

“TypeScript is a typed superset of JavaScript that compiles back to plain JavaScript” – Anders Hejlsberg

“TypeScript is preview of EcmaScript 6 with a downlevel story and with static typing on top” – Anders Hejlsberg

“[TypeScript is a] static formalization of JavaScript’s dynamic run-time type system” – Anders Hejlsberg

Tooling

If you are on Visual Studio 2012 you can install TypeScript 1.0. If you are on Visual Studio 2013 then install Update 2. If you are on an older version of Visual Studio, then it is time to upgrade :)

Learning

The TypeScript Playground is a great place to start testing TypeScript.

Their tutorial is of limited value, but the Handbook gives you a compact view of the language features and is very useful.

And of the course the language spec is available as well.

Videos

Anders Hejlsberg at Build 2014 – http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2014/3-576

Luke Hoban at Fluent Conf 2013 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UPMqtrbw7E