What time is it?! Time to announce that our next stable release of Node.js Tools 1.2 for Visual Studio (NTVS) is available for download! NTVS 1.2 supports Visual Studio 2015 (including the free Visual Studio Community Edition and Express for Web).

With Node.js Tools for Visual Studio, we strive to make it easier than ever to build enterprise-grade Node.js applications by supporting you at every stage of your application—from powerful code completions, to advanced debugging and profiling, to unit testing, cloud deployment, and much, much more.

What’s new in v1.2?

Apart from support for Node.js v6.x and numerous bug fixes all across the product, we’ve focused on increasing developer productivity with the following improvements.

Faster, better ES6 IntelliSense

Whether you were running into performance issues or craving the latest and greatest JavaScript goodness, the new ES6 IntelliSense experience is now on by default, and better than ever! The new ES6 IntelliSense engine takes advantage of type definition files to provide better and more performant IntelliSense. This is applicable for the most popular Node.js frameworks, such as Commander, Express, jQuery and Knockout.

And, of course, everything just works. Whenever you include a new npm package, the associated “typings” will be automatically downloaded to your project, which will enable you to see relevant completions next time you ‘require’ a module.

That said, while we hope you’ll love the new IntelliSense features, we realize it’s a significant departure from our earlier static analysis engine. So we continue to provide that as a fallback option as we continue to iterate on this experience.

More reliable debugging

Advanced debugging is the cornerstone of NTVS, we’ve made it even better by addressing several user-reported issues. So if breakpoints weren’t working properly sometimes, or things were generally inconsistent, be sure to download this release to get the latest fixes!

Improved Performance

Hangs and crashes are a drag, but not anymore! This release provides significantly improved stability and performance, including reducing out-of-memory crashes seen in prior versions. We’ve also made several improvements to our project system, so you can expect improved project load times (especially during “Add from Existing Code”).

Still running into problems? Please, file an issue on GitHub so we can work together to resolve it!

Improved Unit Testing Experiences

While it’s generally best practice to avoid writing bugs altogether, some of us are not omniscient, and find unit tests to be pretty helpful. So we’ve made some improvements to the unit testing experience, including adding tape support thanks to @jcansdale (#989).

Want support for your favorite test framework? Let us know – we may be able to include it in the next update of NTVS. Or better yet, just submit a PR on GitHub!

Get started with Node.js Tools 1.2 for Visual Studio

Download Node.js Tools 1.2 for Visual Studio to get started developing Node.js applications in Visual Studio. And as always, for comments, compliments, or complaints, file an issue, join us on Gitter, or shoot us a tweet. We’d love to hear your feedback, especially if it comes in the form of a pull request.

Lastly, a special thanks to our community – NTVS is a free and open source project, and this release simply would not have been possible without your support, so thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who’s already active on our GitHub repo, and looking forward to meeting all of you who just clicked this link! J

Onwards!

Sara Itani, Software Engineer, Node.js Tools @mousetraps Sara is an engineer focused on building best-of-breed Node.js developer tools. At first, she was skeptical about Node.js – that is, until she realized its full potential…. Now, she’s all in, and excited to help it take over the world by bringing the power of Visual Studio to the Node.js community. She, for one, welcomes our new JavaScript overlords.