This is actually kinda awsome.
I had a terrible experince some months back trying to get a Cordova app made for Android/iOS to work on Win8. As a result of the special javascript rules in Win8, not event the Angular source was possible to run without encapsulation all "insertBefore" in jQuery-lite in "MSApp.execUnsafeLocalFunction".<p>Together with the toolkit they are even providing example ToDo-apps for Angular, Backbone and WinJs which makes me hope all the issues I struggled with is now fixed.(Possible by running the app inside a webview instead as an native WinJS app).
I use MS VS 2013 on a daily basis at work and on my own personal projects. This is indeed good news. MS is, without a doubt, moving in the right direction.
This is awesome on multiple levels, but mainly it unchains the "cloud" from Cross Platform app development. Everything but vanilla Apache Cordova (Intel App Framework / AppMobi, PhoneGap, Xamrian) insist on compiling your code on their servers. The effect is they take away a lot of control from the programmer.<p>If you insist on plain old Cordova, you end up with a text editor (Notepad++), with a cmd.exe window (for cordova/ node.js) and Chrome (for ripple, the Debug env). It will be really nice to get all of this into an IDE.