JavaScript is a familiar programming language to developers and its one of the languages that developers can use to make Windows 8-based apps. Today, Microsoft announced a new programming language which it is calling TypeScript that's designed to extend the features of the familiar JavaScript.
Microsoft has already launched the official TypeScript webpage, which includes an early version that developers can download right now to check out for themselves. In a new post on the Visual Studio blog, S. Somasegar, the corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft, talks about the growth of JavaScript among developers. Microsoft's plan with TypeScript it to make it easier for software makers to create large scale JavaScript-based applications.
Somasegar states:
TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that combines type checking and static analysis, explicit interfaces, and best practices into a single language and compiler. By building on JavaScript, TypeScript keeps you close to the runtime you’re targeting while adding only the syntactic sugar necessary to support large applications and large teams. Importantly, TypeScript enables great tooling experiences for JavaScript development, like those we've built for .NET and C++ and continue to innovate on with projects like “Roslyn”. This is true whether you’re writing client-side JavaScript to run on Windows, Internet Explorer, and other browsers and operating systems, or whether you’re writing server-side JavaScript to run on Windows Azure and other servers and clouds.
The blog states that all code written in JavaScript works with TypeScript. An example is shown in the "hello, world" example above where the code on the left side is in JavaScript ,but treated as TypeScript. The code on the right contains the output of the TypeScript compiler for this code. Microsoft has also made TypeScript an open source language, with Somasegar saying, "The TypeScript language is made available under the Open Web Foundation’s Final Specification Agreement (OWFa 1.0), and we invite the community to discuss the language specification."
Somasegar ends the blog post by saying, "I personally am super excited about what the impact of TypeScript can be on the world of software development, particularly in a world where there is so much momentum for the web programming model. This is another important step in the journey for great tools for standards web development from Microsoft."
Source: Visual Studio blog | Images via Microsoft
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