UPDATED 14:29 EDT / NOVEMBER 26 2013

NEWS

Microsoft opens the door of Visual Studio for Node.js developers

Node.js is quickly becoming one of the most popular server-side development platforms. However, Microsoft has never been able to take full advantage of this tool on the Windows operating system to develop applications based on Node.js.

But that might be over now for Windows developers because even closed system like Microsoft seems to be changing for open source platform. Microsoft has launched a new Node.js tool in Visual Studio (NTVS), currently in alpha, which now enables developers to edit and debug Node.js in the popular Microsoft IDE. The alpha release of NTVS resides on CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project-hosting web site.

NTVS supports editing, Intellisense, profiling, and debugging locally and remotely for Windows, MacOS and Linux. The tools also have the ability to easily deploy applications to Windows Azure instances and remote debugging running on other machines.

Node.js allows developers to write their server-side JavaScript and it appears that Microsoft has kept all the essential elements of this application process. As a team member of the Microsoft Web Platform, Scott Hanselman notes that the team has decided not to “re-do things that have worked well”. The tools use the executable standard node.exe and debugger V8 (Node.js uses Google Chrome V8 ultrafast runtime).

“One of the things that’s impressed me about the way they integrated node.js into Visual Studio was that they didn’t try to recreate or re-do things that already worked well. It’s node, it runs node.exe, it uses the V8 debugger, it uses the V8 profiler because that’s what people use. Duh. But, for example, NTVS can take the output from the V8 profiler and display it using the Visual Studio Profiler Reporting Tools. No need to reinvent the wheel, just use the right tool for the job,” Hanselman said in the blog post.

The plug-in provides a graphical user interface for the Node Package Manager though which you can load libraries for the server-side JavaScript framework from the npm repository within Visual Studio. The connection to Microsoft’s cloud platform, Windows Azure, is also already in place to support the repository. With this integration in Visual Studio, developers have access to all IDE tools, including Visual Studio IntelliSense which proves to be a very powerful feature.

The Node.js Tools for Visual Studio is available under the Apache open source license. Microsoft continues to say that it is an alpha release and it still has some rough edges. Currently, the plug-in is in alpha status and can be integrated in Visual Studio 2012 and 2013.

Microsoft is not alone

Node.js is an event-driven, non-blocking forming I/O framework, which is based on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. With this framework facilitates the design of JavaScript programs that run completely asynchronously on both the client and on the server and can communicate via events. As an advantage, many developers appear to move in the development of their applications with node.js to deliver consistent and stable applications. Groupon recently moved its web traffic from Ruby to node.js for faster web site access and page loads. The company becomes the world’s largest Node.js deployment products after the migration.

Cloud9 IDE is an open source application that aims to provide a powerful and focused IDE for JavaScript developers.  It is powered by the Ajax.org platform and makes use of HTML5, node.js, socket.io and many other projects. Cloud9 IDE has integrated debuggers for node.js and Google Chrome which can be started, paused and stopped from the IDE. Through a simple interface within Cloud9, you can specify how many instances of an app to deploy, how much RAM to allocate and which version of Node.js to use.

ActiveState has released the Komodo IDE for node.js. Komodo development tool for programmers is well-suited for developing large-scale Web applications and can work with scripting languages such as Python and Ruby. The built-in debugging support for Node.js provides deep extensibility, Vim emulation mode, expandable data structures and objects.


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