8 ms·

Node.js Tools for Visual Studio

104 points by GravityWell 12y ago

svas 12y ago
This is awesome. Intellisense support will certainly beat using vim for my node projects :-) It also appears to work with the free version of VS (Visual Studio Express).
nevi-me 12y ago
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.
- smortaz 12y ago
  Thanks for trying it nevi-me. Please give the Beta bits a try - lots of bug fixes, including in the profiler.
GravityWell 12y ago
I had to see it to believe it, but here it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4
egeozcan 12y ago
I've been following this project since the earlier times and the progress is really impressive. Thank you for the amazing work.
pingec 12y ago
Does anyone else get the impression that MS shifted a lot of its attention to web developers? 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'm having a hard time keeping up...
- drawkbox 12y ago
  Their new OS in a sense is Azure, they want developers of all platforms to run on their cloud. All of these tools have an easy tie to Azure which isn't bad, but the lock-in is happening farther up at the service level now. Web developers are huge in that area.
  - gol706 12y ago
    They did offer an olive branch as far as Azure lock-in by releasing some of the Azure components (Mobile Services and the Azure Pack) to download and run in your own environment. That said some of those pieces require a pretty high overhead. As with most Microsoft stuff, you get a great fully integrated story if you use their whole stack, but if you want to swap one one piece it falls apart a little. My clients have compliance issues that make cloud providers hard to use so it's disappointing that I can't really use all this coon new stuff.
- outside1234 12y ago
  This is an industry shift in my opinion. People are sick of writing the same app three times and it wouldn't surprise me to see many more hybrid apps in the next year.
- prezjordan 12y ago
  Where does it say that this was made by MS?
  - outside1234 12y ago
    the first comment. the project is lead by MS but takes community pull requests.
bananas 12y ago
Perhaps I'm paranoid but I'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. 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'm not biased against necessarily but all-encompassing announcements like the ones over the last couple of weeks make me suspicious. Edit: to extend my thoughts on this some more: I don't think we're seeing embrace and extend. I think we're seeing "go on - use our tooling". Once you're in a tool ecosystem it'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're working on (Office/VS/Xamarin potentially). 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.
- GravityWell 12y ago
  I'm hardly an MS fanboy, and I'm not sure what announcements you're referring to, but it's hard for me to see a downside to this.
- rch 12y ago
  I don't believe we'll see 'embrace and extend' being applied to Node and Python, which are the two ecosystems I'd be concerned about. I'll just welcome the added support, and hope that it leads to better acceptance of my prefered tools in more conservative environments.
- JeremyMorgan 12y ago
  It's a simple game of catch up. These ecosystems popped up and flourished very fast and if anything Microsoft was slow to adapt. They've learned enough hard lessons in their history ignoring emerging technologies and clearly they're not ready to make the same mistake again. Just like the ASP stack and it's rapid advancements. They know if they don't start innovating fast they'll be finished.
- iamthepieman 12y ago
  This is as insightful comment and the points you raise may be important for a startup, SAAS or software product company to consider. A lot of organizations use and develop software but aren't software companies. "A fully heterogenous system with a sole vendor mediating your access" is a good thing for these companies. I do a lot of contract work for state and local governments. They are already fully invested in SQL Server, IIS and Active Directory. For both these organizations and myself as a contractor to them I see the increased openness of Microsoft as only a good thing.
mavdi 12y ago
It's an attempt to bring back developer to windows platform. I personally don't know a single serious web developer using windows unless they are coding in .NET.
- skrebbel 12y ago
  That might say more about you than about the world's developers. I didn't see the stats, but most developers I know use Windows. Like, 60% or so. Different area, different industry?
  - mavdi 12y ago
    I see a lot of frontend and backend developers. Node, Ruby, Java, general Frontend, Clojure, JS and not a single windows user.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
      - mavdi 12y ago
        According to this the demand was highest in 2005. :)
        ivanca 12y ago
        Sorry, still true: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs%20mac%2C%20nodejs%20windows%2C%20nodejs%20linux&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs%20mac%2C%20nod...
        likeclockwork 12y ago
        That's a search trend. It includes people searching for help. I'm not surprised Windows leads it for Node, it's a pain to work with most *nix software (especially that which doesn't have a point and click interface) on Windows.
preavy 12y ago
Without going too far off-topic, does anyone know anything about a SQL Server driver for Node.js? There was this, but it hasn't been updated in a while. https://github.com/Azure/node-sqlserver https://github.com/Azure/node-sqlserver
- tracker1 12y ago
  I find the tedious npm module works a bit better, and cross platform for connecting to MS-SQL, it has some rough edges, but was at least more consistent for me. The MS client didn't work as well for me early on. It's worth noting my usage has been pretty limited.
jw2013 12y ago
It's better late than never. It's just easier to say 'I quit' because it'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. So what's next for MS? I think they are getting the direction right for opening up for external MS product users, and now it'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.
- NicoJuicy 12y ago
  There's a reason why Visual Studio continues to impress you. I once saw a presentation of the Visual Studio lead in Belgium, where he claimed that there were over 1200 people involved in the Visual Studio project. If that's true, i don't think there is any IDE that can top that number and it explains why Visual Studio is the best tool for (almost any) job. People should realize that Visual Studio is not solely C#, it's NodeJS, PHP, Mono, Python, javascript and so much more in one environment (with a good autocompletion). If you have Windows and are a developer, i suggest you to install one of the Express editions, just to try it out. I must admit, not everything is "as awesome as it is" in the express versions because of some limitations on extensions, but in my experience, you can do everything you need in the Express editions. But i don't think visual studio wouldn't be as good as it is, if it was free or opensource. (replacing 1200 developers would be very hard). PS. Can anyone confirm my statement of 1200 developers/freelancers? I really think that's the number the Visual Studio lead developer mentioned.
- NicoJuicy 12y ago
  There's a reason why Visual Studio continues to impress you. I once saw a presentation of the Visual Studio lead in Belgium, where he claimed that there were over 1200 people involved in the Visual Studio project. If that's true, i don't think there is any IDE that can top that number and it explains why Visual Studio is the best tool for (almost any) job. People should realize that Visual Studio is not solely C#, it's NodeJS, PHP, Mono, Python and so much more in one environment. If you have Windows, i suggest you install one of the Express editions, just to try it out. I must admit, not everything is "as awesome as it is", because there are some limitations on the Express versions considering extensions. But i don't think visual studio wouldn't be as good as it is, if it was free or opensource. (1200 developers (don't think fulltime though) to replace would be a very hard thing)
balls187 12y ago
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. Sadly the only reason I keep my windows based desktop around these days is PC gaming is still very much windows based.
- outside1234 12y ago
  I keep hearing this meme but I use node on Windows and don't have any issues with this. You have to have Visual Studio and Python installed, but most of us have that anyway. Which node modules are problem children?
  - balls187 12y ago
    We had a lot of issues with sqlite. What version of VS did you need? Some of the information on getting gyp working was like VS2008 SP1, plus the Win7.1 SDK. If this is no longer true, I'll give it a whirl.
    - NicoJuicy 12y ago
      I had the same trouble (used SQLLite for RoR), i think it was my 64 bit version of Win7, which gave the most problems (some compiling errors). A lot has been mentioned on the internet (how to fix it), but none seemed to work. I even recompiled everything :(
    - outside1234 12y ago
      I use VS2013 with it and it works great.
      - balls187 12y ago
        EE?
        outside1234 12y ago
        I'm using Ultimate (was that the question?)
angersock 12y ago
I'd sell a good friend of mine if I could debug my node extension native code and javascript server code from the same IDE.
- smortaz 12y ago
  angersock - if you could file a feature request on http://nodejstools.codeplex.com http://nodejstools.codeplex.com that'd be great. We did implement support for this for Python (https://pytools.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Mixed-mode%20debugging https://pytools.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Mixed-mode%20deb...), so it's not out of the question.. thx.
notastartup 12y ago
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. Now on this Node.JS IDE, it actually makes me want to use Node.js because it's on Visual Studio, however, I'm also open to alternative IDE. My favorite is Jetbrain'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'm not sure if webstorm has extensive support for it.
GravityWell 12y ago
Note for those visiting the thread, I found one of the big things with this release is the support for Edit & Continue: http://nodejstools.codeplex.com/releases/view/104141 http://nodejstools.codeplex.com/releases/view/104141 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4 It was in the original title, but has been edited out.
- GravityWell 12y ago
  I just fired up a NodejsConsoleApp project in VS 2013, created a few simple functions, set a breakpoint, and started stepping through. To be fair, I assumed Edit and Continue would work like it works for other .Net or Native projects, or like the old VB or even VBA. 1) "Set Next Statement" doesn't work, which is a pretty big part of E&C 2) I could change code and literals without stopping and restarting the debugging session. Each change causes the current statement to jump to the top of the current function, or to the first line if modifying code outside of any function. Local variables are reset, but globals retain their state. 3) Interestingly, I could change code in a function that does not have the focus, and nothing is reset, then step into that function. I remember seeing something similar when V8 was being demoed and showed a "live edit" capability, so I guess NTVS has similar functionality. It short, it sort of works, but it's not the same as E&C for .Net (C# or VB), C/C++ native code, or Office VBA.
smortaz 12y ago
(group lead here) Thanks GravityWell for posting. We just got done giving a talk on NTVS & 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/python in their enterprise. The response was around 75-85% Yes to both, which was somewhat higher that I had expected. The cool new feature is this Beta are TypeScript integration, Remote debugging (inc. linux), Edit&Continue (no server restart), free edition (NTVS + VS Express), etc. and numerous bug fixes. To address a few comments regarding strategy - most are correct, though some are over thinking it a bit :). The project was proposed & 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's gained some momentum thanks to the community and it's become important enough that Scott Guthrie mentioned it in his keynote, and Soma (SVP for developer division) just blogged about it. a few new videos (pls excuse the production, we do our own videos...) new npm UI (community contributed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwSzxFY5CMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwSzxFY5CMI twitter sentiment app -- https://youtu.be/9tf6HmG9VAA https://youtu.be/9tf6HmG9VAA remote debugging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4
- _random_ 12y ago
  So, should we stop learning C#? I mean what's the point with the current "JS is a ubiquitous silver bullet" trend? How does the Project Helios fit in?
- malandrew 12y ago
  Do you guys do any automated testing of node.js apps on windows hosts via vagrant? The vagrant-windows and winrm gems are woefully out of date and broken on vagrant 1.5.1, so I was wondering how you guys handle testing node.js apps running on windows.
- patja 12y ago
  It is great that the installation works with Express. Much preferable to the approach taken by the Python Tools for VS requiring a separate installation of the bare VS shell. They say they can't enable installation of PTVS on Express because Express doesn't support extensions. I guess you aren't doing NTVS as an extension. Any hope for getting PTVS to install on Express using whatever method you are using?

104 points by GravityWell 12y ago

svas 12y ago

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

nevi-me 12y ago

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.

smortaz 12y ago
Thanks for trying it nevi-me. Please give the Beta bits a try - lots of bug fixes, including in the profiler.

GravityWell 12y ago

I had to see it to believe it, but here it is. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4

egeozcan 12y ago

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

pingec 12y ago

Does anyone else get the impression that MS shifted a lot of its attention to web developers? 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'm having a hard time keeping up...

drawkbox 12y ago
Their new OS in a sense is Azure, they want developers of all platforms to run on their cloud. All of these tools have an easy tie to Azure which isn't bad, but the lock-in is happening farther up at the service level now. Web developers are huge in that area.
- gol706 12y ago
  They did offer an olive branch as far as Azure lock-in by releasing some of the Azure components (Mobile Services and the Azure Pack) to download and run in your own environment. That said some of those pieces require a pretty high overhead. As with most Microsoft stuff, you get a great fully integrated story if you use their whole stack, but if you want to swap one one piece it falls apart a little. My clients have compliance issues that make cloud providers hard to use so it's disappointing that I can't really use all this coon new stuff.
outside1234 12y ago
This is an industry shift in my opinion. People are sick of writing the same app three times and it wouldn't surprise me to see many more hybrid apps in the next year.
prezjordan 12y ago
Where does it say that this was made by MS?
- outside1234 12y ago
  the first comment. the project is lead by MS but takes community pull requests.

bananas 12y ago

Perhaps I'm paranoid but I'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. 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'm not biased against necessarily but all-encompassing announcements like the ones over the last couple of weeks make me suspicious. Edit: to extend my thoughts on this some more: I don't think we're seeing embrace and extend. I think we're seeing "go on - use our tooling". Once you're in a tool ecosystem it'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're working on (Office/VS/Xamarin potentially). 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.

GravityWell 12y ago
I'm hardly an MS fanboy, and I'm not sure what announcements you're referring to, but it's hard for me to see a downside to this.
rch 12y ago
I don't believe we'll see 'embrace and extend' being applied to Node and Python, which are the two ecosystems I'd be concerned about. I'll just welcome the added support, and hope that it leads to better acceptance of my prefered tools in more conservative environments.
JeremyMorgan 12y ago
It's a simple game of catch up. These ecosystems popped up and flourished very fast and if anything Microsoft was slow to adapt. They've learned enough hard lessons in their history ignoring emerging technologies and clearly they're not ready to make the same mistake again. Just like the ASP stack and it's rapid advancements. They know if they don't start innovating fast they'll be finished.
iamthepieman 12y ago
This is as insightful comment and the points you raise may be important for a startup, SAAS or software product company to consider. A lot of organizations use and develop software but aren't software companies. "A fully heterogenous system with a sole vendor mediating your access" is a good thing for these companies. I do a lot of contract work for state and local governments. They are already fully invested in SQL Server, IIS and Active Directory. For both these organizations and myself as a contractor to them I see the increased openness of Microsoft as only a good thing.

mavdi 12y ago

It's an attempt to bring back developer to windows platform. I personally don't know a single serious web developer using windows unless they are coding in .NET.

skrebbel 12y ago
That might say more about you than about the world's developers. I didn't see the stats, but most developers I know use Windows. Like, 60% or so. Different area, different industry?
- mavdi 12y ago
  I see a lot of frontend and backend developers. Node, Ruby, Java, general Frontend, Clojure, JS and not a single windows user.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - mavdi 12y ago
      According to this the demand was highest in 2005. :)
      - ivanca 12y ago
        Sorry, still true: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs%20mac%2C%20nodejs%20windows%2C%20nodejs%20linux&cmpt=q http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=nodejs%20mac%2C%20nod...
        likeclockwork 12y ago
        That's a search trend. It includes people searching for help. I'm not surprised Windows leads it for Node, it's a pain to work with most *nix software (especially that which doesn't have a point and click interface) on Windows.

preavy 12y ago

Without going too far off-topic, does anyone know anything about a SQL Server driver for Node.js? There was this, but it hasn't been updated in a while. https://github.com/Azure/node-sqlserver https://github.com/Azure/node-sqlserver

tracker1 12y ago
I find the tedious npm module works a bit better, and cross platform for connecting to MS-SQL, it has some rough edges, but was at least more consistent for me. The MS client didn't work as well for me early on. It's worth noting my usage has been pretty limited.

jw2013 12y ago

It's better late than never. It's just easier to say 'I quit' because it'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. So what's next for MS? I think they are getting the direction right for opening up for external MS product users, and now it'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.

NicoJuicy 12y ago
There's a reason why Visual Studio continues to impress you. I once saw a presentation of the Visual Studio lead in Belgium, where he claimed that there were over 1200 people involved in the Visual Studio project. If that's true, i don't think there is any IDE that can top that number and it explains why Visual Studio is the best tool for (almost any) job. People should realize that Visual Studio is not solely C#, it's NodeJS, PHP, Mono, Python, javascript and so much more in one environment (with a good autocompletion). If you have Windows and are a developer, i suggest you to install one of the Express editions, just to try it out. I must admit, not everything is "as awesome as it is" in the express versions because of some limitations on extensions, but in my experience, you can do everything you need in the Express editions. But i don't think visual studio wouldn't be as good as it is, if it was free or opensource. (replacing 1200 developers would be very hard). PS. Can anyone confirm my statement of 1200 developers/freelancers? I really think that's the number the Visual Studio lead developer mentioned.
NicoJuicy 12y ago
There's a reason why Visual Studio continues to impress you. I once saw a presentation of the Visual Studio lead in Belgium, where he claimed that there were over 1200 people involved in the Visual Studio project. If that's true, i don't think there is any IDE that can top that number and it explains why Visual Studio is the best tool for (almost any) job. People should realize that Visual Studio is not solely C#, it's NodeJS, PHP, Mono, Python and so much more in one environment. If you have Windows, i suggest you install one of the Express editions, just to try it out. I must admit, not everything is "as awesome as it is", because there are some limitations on the Express versions considering extensions. But i don't think visual studio wouldn't be as good as it is, if it was free or opensource. (1200 developers (don't think fulltime though) to replace would be a very hard thing)

balls187 12y ago

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. Sadly the only reason I keep my windows based desktop around these days is PC gaming is still very much windows based.

outside1234 12y ago
I keep hearing this meme but I use node on Windows and don't have any issues with this. You have to have Visual Studio and Python installed, but most of us have that anyway. Which node modules are problem children?
- balls187 12y ago
  We had a lot of issues with sqlite. What version of VS did you need? Some of the information on getting gyp working was like VS2008 SP1, plus the Win7.1 SDK. If this is no longer true, I'll give it a whirl.
  - NicoJuicy 12y ago
    I had the same trouble (used SQLLite for RoR), i think it was my 64 bit version of Win7, which gave the most problems (some compiling errors). A lot has been mentioned on the internet (how to fix it), but none seemed to work. I even recompiled everything :(
  - outside1234 12y ago
    I use VS2013 with it and it works great.
    - balls187 12y ago
      EE?
      - outside1234 12y ago
        I'm using Ultimate (was that the question?)

angersock 12y ago

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

smortaz 12y ago
angersock - if you could file a feature request on http://nodejstools.codeplex.com http://nodejstools.codeplex.com that'd be great. We did implement support for this for Python (https://pytools.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Mixed-mode%20debugging https://pytools.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Mixed-mode%20deb...), so it's not out of the question.. thx.

notastartup 12y ago

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. Now on this Node.JS IDE, it actually makes me want to use Node.js because it's on Visual Studio, however, I'm also open to alternative IDE. My favorite is Jetbrain'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'm not sure if webstorm has extensive support for it.

GravityWell 12y ago

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

GravityWell 12y ago
I just fired up a NodejsConsoleApp project in VS 2013, created a few simple functions, set a breakpoint, and started stepping through. To be fair, I assumed Edit and Continue would work like it works for other .Net or Native projects, or like the old VB or even VBA. 1) "Set Next Statement" doesn't work, which is a pretty big part of E&C 2) I could change code and literals without stopping and restarting the debugging session. Each change causes the current statement to jump to the top of the current function, or to the first line if modifying code outside of any function. Local variables are reset, but globals retain their state. 3) Interestingly, I could change code in a function that does not have the focus, and nothing is reset, then step into that function. I remember seeing something similar when V8 was being demoed and showed a "live edit" capability, so I guess NTVS has similar functionality. It short, it sort of works, but it's not the same as E&C for .Net (C# or VB), C/C++ native code, or Office VBA.

smortaz 12y ago

(group lead here) Thanks GravityWell for posting. We just got done giving a talk on NTVS & 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/python in their enterprise. The response was around 75-85% Yes to both, which was somewhat higher that I had expected. The cool new feature is this Beta are TypeScript integration, Remote debugging (inc. linux), Edit&Continue (no server restart), free edition (NTVS + VS Express), etc. and numerous bug fixes. To address a few comments regarding strategy - most are correct, though some are over thinking it a bit :). The project was proposed & 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's gained some momentum thanks to the community and it's become important enough that Scott Guthrie mentioned it in his keynote, and Soma (SVP for developer division) just blogged about it. a few new videos (pls excuse the production, we do our own videos...) new npm UI (community contributed) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwSzxFY5CMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwSzxFY5CMI twitter sentiment app -- https://youtu.be/9tf6HmG9VAA https://youtu.be/9tf6HmG9VAA remote debugging https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAroJmb6XY4

_random_ 12y ago
So, should we stop learning C#? I mean what's the point with the current "JS is a ubiquitous silver bullet" trend? How does the Project Helios fit in?
malandrew 12y ago
Do you guys do any automated testing of node.js apps on windows hosts via vagrant? The vagrant-windows and winrm gems are woefully out of date and broken on vagrant 1.5.1, so I was wondering how you guys handle testing node.js apps running on windows.
patja 12y ago
It is great that the installation works with Express. Much preferable to the approach taken by the Python Tools for VS requiring a separate installation of the bare VS shell. They say they can't enable installation of PTVS on Express because Express doesn't support extensions. I guess you aren't doing NTVS as an extension. Any hope for getting PTVS to install on Express using whatever method you are using?