Just a couple of days ago Angular 11 was released, together with new versions of the Angular CLI and Angular Material.

This is mostly a maintenance, performance and tooling release with no major new features introduced or API changes. So what changed?

If you upgrade you will get an improved version of the Angular CLI, with:

1.      Faster builds

2.      Smaller bundle sizes

3.      Better build reporting on bundle size so that you can better control the size of your application as new dependencies are added

The main feature - Hot Reload Mode

But the main feature of this release is the new Hot Module Replacement functionality of the Angular Cli development server.

You can now simply launch your development server in hot reload mode using the following command:

ng serve --hmr

And now, whenever you edit a component, it will get replaced on the fly in the live application without having to reload the whole page, which creates a much better developer experience and allows for a faster development cycle.

Component Test Harnesses:

Component test harness allows tests to interact with components using supported APIs.

TypeScript 4.0 Support:

Angular team has dropped support for TypeScript 3.9. Now Angular 11 only supports TypeScript 4.0.

Webpack 5 Support:

Webpack 5 is the latest version and was released in the last month. It is still not fully stable.

Angular 11 provides experimental support for Webpack 5 and you can use it with Angular 11 to try out new things.

Remove root TSLint configuration and use only ESLin:

Remove the root-level tslint.json file.

Angular 11 brings a large number of small changes like:

1. Angular CLI can now generate resolve guards
2. Stricter types built in pipes
3. New automated migrations and schematics
4. Lazy loading support for named outlets
5. Service worker improvements