Node Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS) has reached its 1.0 release. This extension is supported by all paid versions of Visual Studio 2012/2013 as well as VS Community and VS Express for Web.
NTVS isn’t just for Node.js, it also supports io.js. Since both are based on the web stack, there is full editor support for JavaScript, TypeScript, HTML, CSS, and JSON. Syntax highlighting and code completion is supported across the board, even in the REPL window.
On the package management side, the Node Package Manager (npm) is supported in the UI much like we see support for NuGet packages.
The Visual Studio integration continues with debugging and performance metrics. In addition to step-through debugging and breakpoints, Visual Studio’s performance reporting features are linked to V8’s profiling APIs, allowing you to “quickly track down performance issues”.
Unit testing hasn’t been forgotten either. Out of the box, NTVS supports mocha, but other unit test frameworks can be added with the appropriate adapter.
