Microsoft continues to invest in Node.js, this time by introducing a new, open source SQL Server Driver and new Node-specific features in WebMatrix.
Node.js is already supported in Windows Azure and now Microsoft is looking to improve tooling around the same – WebMatrix 2 sports several new features which aim to simplify Node development on Windows machines including
- Streamlined installation
- New starter templates
- Intellisense
- Support for Jade and EJS templating engines
- A new CoffeeScript Editor
You can see these features in more detail in this article by Justin Beckwith. WebMatrix 2 also has other new features for web development in general, such as better support for LESS, Emulators for Windows and iOS devices, and a new extensions gallery.
Michail Arkhipov, Program Manager for Visual Studio Web Tools, states on his blog post -
WebMatrix v2 employs the same WPF based core editor surface that first appeared in Visual Studio 2010. This allows us to share features between VS, VWD and WebMatrix.
As such, it is at least technically feasible that some of these features could eventually make it to Visual Studio as well.
The new SQL Server Driver for Node.js allows you to write inline queries and fetch data from SQL Server or SQL Azure. Apart from fetching all the rows in one result set by passing a call-back function, you can also subscribe to individual events when the metadata and then each row or column is fetched. You can see the syntax in these tests.
SQL Server is not the first relational database to have Node drivers – there are already several open source Oracle and MySQL drivers. Node.js is often used with NoSQL databases such as MongoDB or CouchDB, their JSON-based API working well with JavaScript.
