A Node.js IDE for Visual Studio Devs -- Visual Studio Magazine

A Node.js IDE for Visual Studio Devs

Microsoft debuts Node.js Tools for Visual Studio version 1.0 after a year of development.

By Michael Domingo
03/25/2015

The Visual Studio team has turned out version 1.0 of its Node.js Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS) after a year of development work on it. The tool can be best described as an extension of Visual Studio for building Node.js apps in JavaScript. In even simpler terms, it "turns Visual Studio into a Node.js IDE," said Sara Itani, a Microsoft software engineer working with the Visual Studio team, in a blog post.

NTVS works with all versions of Visual Studio 2012 and 2013, including the Community and Online versions. It supports working in Node.js, io.js, JavaScript, TypeScript, a subset of EcmaScript 6, HTML, CSS and JSON.

The NTVS IDE has support for syntax highlighting, code folding, and code completions via IntelliSense within the editor, and REPL support comes with syntax highlighting and code completion, as well. NTVS also integrates with npm, the package manager for Node.js, with the ability to manage dependencies from within Solution Explorer.

NTVS also can be used to debug and profile Node.js apps and it integrates with Visual Studio Test Explorer, which can be used to "author, run, debug, and filter unit tests without having to switch to a command prompt," Itani blogged.

Check out the tutorial for building and deploying a Node.js app through the new Azure App Service.

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