Node.js Tools for Visual Studio

(group lead here) Thanks GravityWell for posting.<p>We just got done giving a talk on NTVS &amp; PTVS at Build in SF. The reception was great (given this is a primarily .net conference). I did an informal poll of the audience (180 or so), asking whether they were planning on deploying node&#x2F;python in their <i>enterprise</i>. The response was around 75-85% Yes to both, which was somewhat higher that I had expected.<p>The cool new feature is this Beta are TypeScript integration, Remote debugging (inc. linux), Edit&amp;Continue (no server restart), free edition (NTVS + VS Express), etc. and numerous bug fixes.<p>To address a few comments regarding strategy - most are correct, though some are over thinking it a bit :). The project was proposed &amp; started by the PTVS (python) folks, and mgmt was rather lukewarm about it. It was definitely not part of some uber P1 strategy. I wish it was. However, since then it&#x27;s gained some momentum thanks to the community and it&#x27;s become important enough that Scott Guthrie mentioned it in his keynote, and Soma (SVP for developer division) just blogged about it.<p>a few new videos (pls excuse the production, we do our own videos...)<p>new npm UI (community contributed) <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwSzxFY5CMI" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=AwSzxFY5CMI</a><p>twitter sentiment app -- <a href="https://youtu.be/9tf6HmG9VAA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;9tf6HmG9VAA</a><p>remote debugging <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4</a>

Perhaps I&#x27;m paranoid but I&#x27;m seeing a lot of tentacles extending around a few ecosystems from Microsoft. I see lots of praise but some rational analysis and caution might be worth considering.<p>For ref, I deal with Microsoft a lot and wrote a ton of c# over the least decade (more than anything else probably) so I&#x27;m not biased against necessarily but all-encompassing announcements like the ones over the last couple of weeks make me suspicious.<p>Edit: to extend my thoughts on this some more:<p>I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;re seeing embrace and extend. I think we&#x27;re seeing &quot;go on - use our tooling&quot;. Once you&#x27;re in a tool ecosystem it&#x27;s hard to get out of. I mean really hard. Same goes with cloud ecosystems which neatly integrate with their tooling. Their offering is to host all of your stuff (Azure) and mediate between you and what you&#x27;re working on (Office&#x2F;VS&#x2F;Xamarin potentially).<p>A fully heterogenous system with a sole vendor mediating your access becomes an interesting situation when for political, financial or legal reasons you want or need to leave.

It&#x27;s better late than never. It&#x27;s just easier to say &#x27;I quit&#x27; because it&#x27;s likely none of Node.js developers will switch to using Visual Studio rather than give it a try. Though I probably will never use Visual Studio for writing my Node.js project, kudos for MS not being the old MS.<p>So what&#x27;s next for MS? I think they are getting the direction right for opening up for external MS product users, and now it&#x27;s time to recruit top talent again. There are just too many great hackers think MS is old (just look at some of replies in this story), which to large degree is true, and it will take time to fix that, but it can be possible done with: 1) create openness [culture, keep taking more open-source project like open-day-light, keep opening tech inside MS to others, etc.]; 2) buy early-stage companies through acqui-hire. It will be an uphill-battle and I am not an expert on this, and I am very interested in what other people here on HN thinks.

Note for those visiting the thread, I found one of the big things with this release is the support for Edit &amp; Continue:<p><a href="http://nodejstools.codeplex.com/releases/view/104141" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;nodejstools.codeplex.com&#x2F;releases&#x2F;view&#x2F;104141</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4</a><p>It was in the original title, but has been edited out.

I had to see it to believe it, but here it is. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4</a>

Until they can address the problem with building certain NPM modules on windows (ie `node-gyp` related ones), this is a bit of a non-starter.<p>Sadly the only reason I keep my windows based desktop around these days is PC gaming is still very much windows based.

Does anyone else get the impression that MS shifted a lot of its attention to web developers?<p>There is an incredible amount of web technologies and dev tools coming from ms that are being presented at Build 2014. In fact so many that I&#x27;m having a hard time keeping up...

I&#x27;ve been following this project since the earlier times and the progress is really impressive. Thank you for the amazing work.

I&#x27;d sell a good friend of mine if I could debug my node extension native code and javascript server code from the same IDE.

I tried the alpha a few months back, and found it to understandably be lacking, My biggest frustration with it was trying to profile the performance of a complex piece of code with a number of callbacks and such. NTVS would only look at the first iteration, and not tell me anything useful (at the time I was tracing a memory leak). There were a few other inconveniences which I noticed that issues were raised for, hopefully most were fixed.

Without going too far off-topic, does anyone know anything about a SQL Server driver for Node.js? There was this, but it hasn&#x27;t been updated in a while. <a href="https://github.com/Azure/node-sqlserver" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Azure&#x2F;node-sqlserver</a>

This is awesome. Intellisense support will certainly beat using vim for my node projects :-)<p>It also appears to work with the free version of VS (Visual Studio Express).

I like the direction MS is going. At this rate they can possibly shed themselves out of the shadows of Google and Apple and truly emerge as an open, innovative company. Why not, they got the cash to do so.<p>Now on this Node.JS IDE, it actually makes me want to use Node.js because it&#x27;s on Visual Studio, however, I&#x27;m also open to alternative IDE.<p>My favorite is Jetbrain&#x27;s IDE products, I use webstorm and phpstorm, and pycharms. I love them all, would be nice if they had one for Node.js, as I&#x27;m not sure if webstorm has extensive support for it.

It&#x27;s an attempt to bring back developer to windows platform. I personally don&#x27;t know a single serious web developer using windows unless they are coding in .NET.