This is great news, but aren't there bigger fish to fry with really supporting node.js & npm on Windows? The 255 character path limit bug has been around for a long time and still unresolved/broken on Windows (see <a href="https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/6960" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/6960</a> and <a href="https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/5641" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/5641</a>). Suggestions to fix it on the Windows side have been closed too: <a href="http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studio/suggestions/2156195-fix-260-character-file-name-length-limitation" rel="nofollow">http://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-studi...</a> Would be nice for people to stop throwing it around like a hot potato and fix it for good. Although it sounds like an edge case, it's actually really common for some libraries to his this limit and be unusable on Windows.
Gotta hand it to Microsoft.<p>Behind the times on web dev for so long, now busting out open source left and right, teaming up on Angular with Google, jumping on with nodejs, modernizing their tools, "gently" pushing locked in MS web devs out of the darkness of that Web Forms madness into the light of real web development.<p>I've always been a LAMP stack dev but they have at least caught my attention as of late.
I was really excited about Visual Studio for a chance at Coffeescript intellisense, however I learned after the several gig download it wasn't supported. It seems there is basically no way to get proper autocomplete in any editor for CS, suggesting maybe I should just consider Babel for ES6/7 despite my massive love for CS and giant projects built in it.
I remember a bunch of problems have been discussed earlier [1] concerning node.js on Windows, such as file-system path length limits and broken symlinks and lack of modules actually tested on Windows.<p>That was almost a year ago, so how do the things stand now?<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7914566" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7914566</a>
Congratulations, guys! I've been following this since node tools since Hanselman's post
<a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingNodejsToolsForVisualStudio.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingNodejsToolsForVisua...</a>
Honestly, it's good to see a lot of .Net developers getting to see some sunlight. A lot of really interesting things have happened in JavaScript land over the past few years, and there are a ton of really good programmers who have been in .Netland for far too long.
If they free up the developer license, MS will get lots of Apps in for their phone versions as well..They are already supporting javascript for native apps..
How many people do you think will actually use this?<p>I just really cannot ever see mass use of azure and visual studio in the web ecosystem. The people writing nodejs code are all using vim and unix, and you're asking them to give up their workflow and change operating systems. I want to be able to poke around in bash. (edited back in)<p>Sure, some people new to web programming might go this route. But the <i>next</i> big web framework certainly will be on unix first. MS is now in this perpetual state of trying to keep up, and I just can't imagine why anyone serious about web programming wouldn't be on *nix.