Microsoft Publishes Node.js Tools for Visual Studio -- Visual Studio Magazine

Microsoft Publishes Node.js Tools for Visual Studio

The tools are open source and include debugging support.

By Keith Ward
04/05/2014

Node.js is the latest JavaScript platform to find a home in Visual Studio. An increasingly popular language for server-side applications, Microsoft has released Node.js Tools for Visual Studio 1.0 beta.

S. Somasegar, Microsoft's Corporate VP of the Developer Division, announced the suite on his blog Friday. He noted that Node.js Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS) is open source under the Apache 2.0 license and available on CodePlex. As of right now, NTVS isn't listed as a project on the new .NET Foundation Web site, which Microsoft unveiled during the Build show last week. (The Foundation includes the .NET Compiler Platform, formerly code-named "Roslyn.")

One of NTVS' primary benefits is the ability to use Visual Studio's debugger, including "all the core debugging features," Somasegar said, including breakpoints, filters, locals, watches, call-stacks and when-hit actions. Debugging works both locally within a Visual Studio Node project, or remotely in a Node app running on Microsoft Azure.

Other features of note in the 1.0 beta include Edit and Continue, allowing changes to server-side code while it's running; full support for TypeScript, including full IntelliSense, profiling and debugging (TypeScript recently reached its first full, 1.0 release); and Azure Worker Roles. Microsoft has a Node.js Developer Center as part of its Azure documentation.

Node.js was developed by Ryan Dahl. It uses "an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices," according to the official Web site. The most current version is 0.10.26.

About the Author

Keith Ward is the editor in chief of Virtualization & Cloud Review. Follow him on Twitter @VirtReviewKeith.

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Compare New GitHub Copilot Free Plan for Visual Studio/VS Code to Paid Plans

The free plan restricts the number of completions, chat requests and access to AI models, being suitable for occasional users and small projects.
Diving Deep into .NET MAUI

Ever since someone figured out that fiddling bits results in source code, developers have sought one codebase for all types of apps on all platforms, with Microsoft's latest attempt to further that effort being .NET MAUI.
Copilot AI Boosts Abound in New VS Code v1.96

Microsoft improved on its new "Copilot Edit" functionality in the latest release of Visual Studio Code, v1.96, its open-source based code editor that has become the most popular in the world according to many surveys.
AdaBoost Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the AdaBoost.R2 algorithm for regression problems (where the goal is to predict a single numeric value). The implementation follows the original source research paper closely, so you can use it as a guide for customization for specific scenarios.
Versioning and Documenting ASP.NET Core Services

Building an API with ASP.NET Core is only half the job. If your API is going to live more than one release cycle, you're going to need to version it. If you have other people building clients for it, you're going to need to document it.