What does the angle bracket syntax mean in C#

That syntax is called generics. In a nutshell (a very tiny nutshell), imagine that your app had more than 1 database (e.g. MusicStoreDB, MovieStoreDB, etc), you could use the same DropCreateDatabaseAlways class with the different db types. In other words, generics let you define classes and functions that can act on many different types, for example

List<int>, List<string>, List<MyAwesomeClass>