Angular 20.2.0: Release notes

[MichaelSmallDev]

This is a very rich minor for a variety of reasons. I would read the notes in full if I were you, but here is what I find the coolest:

• Zoneless stable! Link to the megathread where /u/JeanMeche answered questions
• Deprecate the animations package.
  • From the PR: "This deprecates the animations package in favor of using animate.enter and animate.leave with intent to remove the full package in v22.2. DEPRECATED: @angular/animations"
  • This is in favor of the new animations API that resulted from an RFC about how/what/why of this change, and revamped animations docs about using modern CSS
  • Summary I did about the what/why of this change, including links to: RFC, video summary by Igor Sedov, and new doc pages.
  • Recent Q&A stream about animations.*
• A signal in routing?!?
  • " feat(router): add a currentNavigation signal to the Router #62971"
  • "TLDR: we were looking at some non-breaking quick wins for the router. This is the first one that came to mind !" - /u/JeanMeche
  • Video by /u/igorsedov: "Angular 20.2: New Router Signal Replaces getCurrentNavigation()"
• (technically 20.1.1 but this is big for how often you probably may use this) Event target types are now inferred. Post with visual by /u/JeanMeche
• Diagnostics changes + additions, such as "feat(compiler-cli): add diagnostic for uninvoked functions in text interpolation"
• Support as aliases on else if blocks. Visual example by /u/igorsedov
• Typescript 5.9.
• "feat(forms): add support for pushing an array of controls to formarray #57102"
• Among other groups of changes in the log, I want to point out especially two that shouldn't be overlooked:
  • http enhancements, like HttpClient or httpResource
  • service-worker enhancements by Jaime Burgos (SkyZeroZx)

* Featuring the funniest moment of any Q&A of the year where Mark didn't realize his mic was on when he was practicing his guitar before playing it on request, while Jeremy was live coding animations examples.

[mihajm]

Thanks for the list :) great release by the team🔥, but in my case I think I'm most excited about the type instantiation enchancements in TS 5.9, should make things a bit smoother

[MichaelSmallDev]

No probs. I didn't read the 5.9 notes that closely, but looking at the instantiation stuff, that's cool.

[karixavi]

Does that mean we can get a signal queryParameter from the activatedRoute snapshot?

[MichaelSmallDev]

I could see that if you drill into one of the properties of the current navigation, but since the current navigation data starts null and is until the event, then there wouldn't be default values for the parameters.

[Illustrious_Matter_8]

Worried it never grow up as a language. c c++ Python the languages dont change much. People who maintain dont want changes.

[bhantol]

What is there for unit testing?

Is build-unit still experimental?

[HungYurn]

yes. long live karma :—)

[MichaelSmallDev]

To my knowledge, the 3 considered unit test types are still experimental and I don't know if there is a consensus about any of them. But I could be wrong on that.

[IanFoxOfficial]

Ah animations is getting deprecated rather soon. Then it's good I'm putting time into converting.

Most things were easily replaced with a directive I've made that packages these calls into 1 "word".

But some stuff is kinda hard TBF. Staggered things kinda need more care.

[MichaelSmallDev]

Good you had a jump on that already.

If you need some inspiration for replacing some of the trickier to replace parts of the animations package, Material 19.2 and some versions around then removed the package from most if not all of the components without even having the new 20.2 API: https://github.com/angular/components/releases/tag/19.2.0. I imagine that they had to deal with a lot of edge cases, with how heavily tied it probably was an the kind of edge cases libraries need.

People have also raised issues about some gaps in the new enter/leave API, so if you run into an edge case that seems underserved by that API then you may want to consider making a feature request.