Upgrading our application to Angular 4 Release Candidate 2 (rc 2). We’ll take a slight detour from our series to upgrade our project to the latest versions.

This is Part 8 of our Real World Angular series. For other parts, see links at the bottom of this post or go to https://blog.realworldfullstack.io/. The app is still in development. Check it out @ https://bitwiser.io.

By now, everyone (following Angular) knows the next version of Angular will be Angular 4, (and not 3). Tentative release schedule - http://angularjs.blogspot.com/2016/12/ok-let-me-explain-its-going-to-be.html

Angular 4 will be released later this month, and will then have a 6 month major release cycle. We want to be ready for 4 as it comes out, so I’m gonna upgrade our project to the latest version of Angular 4.0.0-rc.2 (as of 03/05/2017).

What’s new?

Angular 4.x is (mostly) backwards compatible with Angular 2.x. the breaking change should not impact what we’ve done so far. I guess we’ll find out soon.

Angular 4 brings several performance improvements including reducing the size of the generated code. It also adds improvement on compilation time and has improved type checking for your application with the use of Typescript 2.1+.

For a complete list of changes see - https://github.com/angular/angular/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md#whats-new

Angular 4 requires Typescript 2.1.6+. Our Angular cli is also outdated as the rc-1 is out. It’s time to upgrade all our dependencies to the latest versions.