Ng-News 26/12 covers the Angular Q&A on selectorless and Skills versus MCP, then zoneless testing and auto tick from the Angular Plus Show.
Angular Q&A: selectorless and Skills vs MCP
The monthly Q&A session featured Mark Thompson as host and Alex Rickabaugh, tech lead of the Angular framework.
Alex explained why selectorless got downgraded. Selectorless was a planned feature that would have allowed referring to components in a template by using their class name. In the latest roadmap update, that feature was removed.
According to Alex, selectorless would have been a huge jump. The risk of an AI agent not being able to write modern Angular code was not worth the DX benefits from selectorless. Therefore, that feature is on hold and will be re-evaluated in the future.
Timestamp: 0:05:50
Skills and MCPs: According to Alex, Skills are starting to replace MCP tools, because a Skill can tell the agent about certain CLI commands, which can replace a dedicated MCP tool call.
Timestamp: 23:11
Zoneless testing and auto tick
The Angular Plus Show published an episode on zoneless testing with Andrew Scott (Angular team), @younesjd, and Rainer Hahnekamp.
Zoneless tests run outside Zone.js, which clarifies some patterns but means you cannot use fakeAsync or waitForAsync in that mode.
With zoneless, change detection in tests would be triggered like in the application, whereas in zone-based tests, users had to trigger it very often manually via ComponentFixture#detectChanges.
The panel also discussed auto tick, recently released around the time of recording and covered in a prior ng-news segment.
It can simplify async behavior when timer APIs are faked, but it is not always the first choice: mixing real and fake timers produces confusing failures, and faking timers overrides timing globally and can affect third-party code you do not control.
Upcoming Conferences
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NG Belgrade Conf 2026
NG Belgrade Conf 2026 is the largest Angular conference in the Balkans. It takes place in Belgrade, Serbia, including a Conference Day on May 7th and a Workshop Day on May 8th. Join us to explore the latest trends and best practices in Angular!
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