Node.js Tools for Visual Studio

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/IntroducingNodejsToolsForVisualStudio.aspx

by ambuj • 13 years ago

232 85 13 years ago

legacy2013• 13 years ago

This is great, I've been playing around with node and express recently and just using notepad++, I'll be integrating it into my VS environment when I get home

polskibus2• 13 years ago

Great, I wonder when will they release the standalone version!

smortaz8• 13 years ago

great idea - just created a request for it. please upvote!

https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/workitem/520

smortaz8• 13 years ago

thanks ambuj for submitting. i work on the team & will be around for a couple of hours in case folks have any questions. would love to hear your feedback... cheers.

jbigelow764• 13 years ago

I like this. I smuggled Node into our company to suplant a very difficult to test/debug WCF process and it's slowly been creeping out into bigger use cases. I've tried using VS for managing my Node scripts but it just wasn't a very elegant fit given VS's concept of projects and solutions so I kept falling back to Sublime. I'm excited to see if I can finally maintain just a single editor for both my .NET and Node code.

_random_3• 13 years ago

Why not Web API and SignalR?

jbigelow764• 13 years ago

I like Web API a lot and would have no problems using it more. I've never messed around with SignalR, I had already started playing with Node at that point.

As I mentioned, but didn't elaborate on, in my first post I had an urgent need to fix a production problem as quickly as possible. But the service giving us the problems was opaque, and encumbered by these massive 100+ project .NET solutions that had grown unwieldy for rapid development.

Being able to kick VS+TFS and their ceremony to the curb and hack out a solution with Node and Sublime Text was liberating. But it wasn't really VS I had a problem with, it was paying the price for years of technical debt. That's why I'm excited, I still think VS is a great IDE for my .NET work.

One other final reason I wanted to use Node was because I felt for someone that considered himself to be a "web developer" I was abnormally shitty at javascript and wanted to know it better :)

Touche• 13 years ago

Very nice, will help Node break into the enterprise.

taude2• 13 years ago

Microsoft's definitely giving NodeJS some credibility to enterprise shops

_random_3• 13 years ago

I hope they will understand when is the good case for using it. I wonder which kind of enterprise would need a high-load web site as opposed to a high-performance one?

evanmoran• 13 years ago

This seems useful for the profiling alone.

shanselman• 13 years ago

The profiling will only get better. Right now it profiles everything, but it could potentially be scoped down to "just my code." Plus, it's a sampling profiler as it is so you will need to push some real traffic to work hot spots (as opposed to just browse and click around) in order to get results.

What's cool about it, IMHO (I wrote the post above) is that it takes the V8 profiling stuff and feeds it into the VS visualizer...as it should.

blahbl4hblahtoo• 13 years ago

Wow, for an alpha release that's pretty impressive. Node seems to be really taking off at MS...parts of Azure are built with it...some really large parts of Azure.

It's awesome that they didn't screw with Node either to make it run on Chakra...

sheetjs• 13 years ago

I'm similarly surprised mozilla hasn't come out with an SM-powered node

tracker1• 13 years ago

It's actually been done[1], to more or less success, but hasn't been kept up, and the differences in embedding SpiderMonkey vs V8 were cumbersome iirc. Not to mention compatibility with compiled modules. I was interested as E4X support would have been nicer earlier on, but it's surprising how quickly json has taken over.

[1] https://github.com/zpao/spidernode

polskibus2• 13 years ago

Do you have a reference for Azure internals being written in node.js? I'd love to read about it.

smortaz8• 13 years ago

i'll try to find out. top my head i know the azure node sdk is all node (obviously...), all the cross-plat commands/utils are node, skype, yammer, bing (?), ... all use node to various extents.

some info: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/nodejs/ https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-node https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-tools-xplat

Maarten88• 13 years ago

A colleague reverse engineered Azure Mobile services, written in Node, to find out how it works. He blogged about it here: http://weblogs.asp.net/soever/archive/2013/07/26/azure-mobil...

jokoon• 13 years ago

nooooooooo

(downvote me)

gum_ina_package2• 13 years ago

Seeing things like this gives me hope that one day Windows will be a first class os for web development. Now if I could just maximize the command prompt window....

abrichr• 13 years ago

ConEmu [1] has made CLI on Windows much more tolerable for me.

[1] http://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/

platz• 13 years ago

ConEmu is great; never looked back!

shadowfox• 13 years ago

Conemu with powershell and PSReadline [1] has made things a lot nicer.

[1] https://github.com/lzybkr/PSReadLine

sker• 13 years ago

You can't maximize it, but you can set its width and height. Right click in taskbar -> Properties -> Layout. There are settings for size, position and buffer size. I have mine the size of the whole window and with the biggest possible buffer, as well as a more readable font.

jliechti1• 13 years ago

For Emacs users on Windows, I've found Eshell (M-x eshell)[0] to be much preferable to the normal command window for most tasks.

[0] http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/eshell.ht...

pjmlp9• 13 years ago

Seeing things like this gives me hope that one day Windows will be a first class os for web development.

For many of us it already is.

Already__Taken• 13 years ago

I just fire up the powershell ISE. I'd love a quake style terminal that's just this things console in borderless mode.

anurse• 13 years ago

ConEmu (https://code.google.com/p/conemu-maximus5/) + Quake Mode = Awesome :)

aespinoza3• 13 years ago

windows is a first class os for web development. what is it lacking? i have coded in ruby, python, java and go for the web.

also used different web servers including apache and tomcat.

balac• 13 years ago

For me the lack of many unix tools is a killer and cygwin doesn't cut it. Many build scripts assume a unixy environment and windows is flat-out not supported. Lack of a proper package manager also makes installing and configuring workstations a hassle.

ams61102• 13 years ago

I used to use something called puTTYcyg when I used cygwin on windows. It seems that it's no longer maintained, but it was a decent terminal for Windows without going whole-hog X11 in cygwin.

fro2• 13 years ago

Seems like overkill. Part of why Node is great and so easy to get started with is that all you need is a browser, a text editor, and the terminal. I suppose for people that already use VS this is good, but maybe we should encourage them to write Node apps outside of that environment instead of shoving Node into a giant IDE.

int_19h5• 13 years ago

There's more to development than a text editor, though. Sometimes you do want debugging. And maybe you want syntax highlighting in your REPL. And, perhaps, you'd like some profiling to figure out how to make your Node app run faster.

fro2• 13 years ago

Yes, and most of those things are already available as modular open source tools that fit well in the Node ecosystem. Encouraging people to use one giant, closed, monolithic program for all of those purposes is not a good step forward for Node.

smortaz8• 13 years ago

you have a point. i dont think node in a fat IDE is for everyone / every scenario. i look at it as just another tool in the dev's toolbox. ideal (imho) is a decent web-based tool or light-weight editor plus a capable IDE for larger scale apps that need complex debugging, profiling, mutli-lingual project, etc. support.

for a lighter weight solution, check out: http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Visual-Studio-Online-Monaco/...

jasonlotito• 13 years ago

I suppose for people that already use VS this is good

Yeah, instead of introduction Node this way, they should have specified this was an introducing to node.js Tools for Visual Studio.

weavie• 13 years ago

Well, they're not taking that away from you. You can still get started with the basics. But even node apps can get big.

It's the debugging story I'm really digging here. Being able to just set a breakpoint and hit f5 is real exciting as opposed to having to type "debugger" in your code and then sit around for ages. It's a shame I do all my node work on a Mac.

I'm guessing this won't be available for VS express?

jules• 13 years ago

Just like Python tools for VS it probably won't work with VS express, but it probably will work with the freely available VS shell (that is just the bare Visual Studio IDE without any existing language support in it). So you can get the whole package for free, but obviously only this node.js plugin will be open source.

pjmlp9• 13 years ago

You are free to keep on doing UNIX System V style of work.

ams61102• 13 years ago

Ahhh... a browser, a text editor (emacs for me) and a terminal. That's my ideal dev environment. I've never been able to figure out IDEs.

MilesTeg• 13 years ago

This looks really cool. Is there a way to have Node.js tools work with TypeScript?

smortaz8• 13 years ago

thanks! we're hoping to add TS for Beta.

corysama• 13 years ago

I'm a big fan of Python Tools for Visual Studio (https://pytools.codeplex.com/). Assuming Njs4VS lives up to it's predecessor, it could be a truly wonderful tool.

stinos• 13 years ago

exactly. Honestly, mixed mode debugging made me drool first time I used it.

mmgutz• 13 years ago

I'll admit I'm one of those who whined about nodeJS targeting Windows. Windows is starting to look more and more like a first-tier nodeJS platform with help from Microsoft! Can't wait to try this out.

How about a little golang love in Visual Studio?

tehsuck• 13 years ago

Have fun using npm with MAX_PATH.

joshguthrie2• 13 years ago

This is the kind of thing that makes me want to switch back to Windows.

I like VS since I've been using it to develop a C# app these last two months. I miss a lot of things because I'm too deep in CLI usage (like git...help me...), but had I had it when I tried to play with Ruby on Windows 7 three years ago and discovered the pain of the windows CLI, maybe I would've stayed there.

These Node.js tools are especially great. I spend a lot of time on CLI running my app, installing a module, watching my dev logs,... I couldn't ever imagine anyone using node.js on windows. Now I can and it looks great.

pjmlp9• 13 years ago

Let me guess, you used plain cmd instead of PowerShell.

joshguthrie2• 13 years ago

True. I had used cmd for about 15 years before that, so while using "cd" or "dir" and the classic lingo was okay, doing everything rails-related in CLI just felt..clunky: "why would you have such a bad interface? EasyPHP does everything just fine with a GUI!". Had I known CLI could be more intuitive (hello pipes!), I'd have looked up for a better alternative sooner =)

jayvanguard• 13 years ago

Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a real OS.

talles• 13 years ago

This is a BIG step to make me switch to Windows. Debugging Node.js just like C# is really awesome (no brainer breakpoints and inspection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_1_UqUDx2s).

This plus a decent shell would definitely make me switch (I hate PowerShell).

smortaz8• 13 years ago

thanks talles. note that you can debug from VS to Linux with NTVS. here's the debugging video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ir9ZB8lUg4

iaskwhy• 13 years ago

I haven't tried but there's probably no reason this won't work with Ubuntu installed on a Vagrant VM. Which is exactly how I develop nowadays from a Windows machine. This is crazy!

Xdes2• 13 years ago

I wonder how this compares to the Visual Node[1] plugin by Redgate.

[1] http://www.visualnode.info/

smortaz8• 13 years ago

visualnode was a fork of http://pytools.codeplex.com and they've joined the NTVS project (which is also forked from the same source). Bart Read from red-gate did the npm GUI for NTVS in fact. they stated that they'll shut down visualnode.

Xdes2• 13 years ago

Just got the email.

---

Firstly, thanks for signing up for the beta of Visual Node, and trying out the tool. Your feedback has been incredibly helpful to us.

Today we have a very exciting announcement for you. Since the summer Red Gate has been working with Microsoft on a free, open source Node development environment for Visual Studio called Node Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS). We've just released the first public alpha of NTVS, which you can download from:

https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/

NTVS offers what we believe is a much richer development experience than Visual Node, including:

Various Node project types, IntelliSense and editing, Debugging, including remote debugging on Linux, Profiling, npm, Azure deployment, Support for both Visual Studio 2012 and 2013

In addition you can create NTVS projects based on existing code, making it easy to upgrade from Visual Node to NTVS. Please see https://www.simple-talk.com/blogs/2013/11/22/node-js-develop... for more information.

If you have any feedback we'd love to hear from you. You can report bugs or improvement requests at https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/workitem/list/basic, whilst support and general feedback/discussion is available at https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/discussions. Please do vote on the bugs/improvements you'd most like us to work on.

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you again for participating in the Visual Node beta program. As I said, your feedback has been very helpful, and continues to influence the development of NTVS.

If you have any questions about anything in this email please do post to the discussion URL on Codeplex - we'd love to hear from you.

Kind regards,

Bart Read NTVS Contributor Red Gate Software https://nodejstools.codeplex.com/

LeafyGreenbriar• 13 years ago

For Mac or Linux noders who would prefer an IDE to a simple editor + command line tools, IntelliJ with the Node plugin is pretty good. It has code assist and debugging built in, and IntelliJ is just generally a very good IDE.

Edit: WebStorm from the same company (JetBrains) is cheaper if you don't need all the java tools support.

Node.js Tools for Visual Studio

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