How to Launch Angular for Development from Visual Studio Projects

• You'll want to make sure these settings are only going to apply when you're working with a Debug configuration, so it won't apply in production.

  xml
  1<PropertyGroup>
  2    <Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">Debug</Configuration>
  3    // ...
  4</PropertyGroup>

• .njsproj doesn't know how to use your "start" or "dev" scripts from you package.json, so you'll need to explicitly list out the path to your CLI in the <StartupFile> tag.

  xml
  <StartupFile>node_modules\@angular\cli\bin\ng</StartupFile>

• Adding arguments via <StartupFile> doesn't work, so you'll have to explicitly list them in the <ScriptArguments> tag instead.

  xml
  <ScriptArguments>serve --aot --open=true</ScriptArguments>

• To avoid race conditions where VS tries to launch your app's server before the CLI is finished getting it started, you'll want to use the CLI's --open=true setting directly (instead of <StartWebBrowser>).

  xml
  <StartWebBrowser>false</StartWebBrowser>

Putting it all together, you'll end up with a .njsproj with something like this:

FrontEnd.njsproj
1<PropertyGroup>
2    <Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">Debug</Configuration>
3    // ...
4    <StartupFile>node_modules\@angular\cli\bin\ng</StartupFile>
5    <ScriptArguments>serve --aot --open=true</ScriptArguments>
6    <StartWebBrowser>false</StartWebBrowser>
7    // ...
8  </PropertyGroup>