Today we released the Node.js Tools for Visual Studio 1.0 Beta 2 which is now available for download.

NTVS is Microsoft’s free Visual Studio add-on that enables a rich experience for working with Node.js apps, giving developers the power of the Visual Studio code editor including support for IntelliSense, the Visual Studio debugger, and for running Node.js apps on Microsoft Azure Web Sites or Cloud Services.

Here are the highlights in today’s release:

• New analysis and IntelliSense engine. We created a new IntelliSense engine which is capable of analyzing much larger code bases. Once processed the results of the analysis are cached and reused in subsequent sessions which leads to much better performance compared to our previous release. The new engine is also configurable so you can change how aggressively it works or completely turn it off using the Tools option menu (Tools > Options > Text Editor > Node.js >IntelliSense).
• Improved NPM UI. We updated the NPM management UI so it is easier to use. We’ve also added integrated support for invoking NPM inside of the REPL window with a new .npm command.
• Mocha unit test support. We expanded unit test support to include using tests written with Mocha JavaScript test framework.
• Custom unit tests. You can now add support for your own unit test frameworks by writing a single Node module that will find and run the tests.

We’ve also fixed numerous bugs. See our full release notes for all the details and please send us your feedback through our forum.

Thanks,

Shahrokh

Shahrokh Mortazavi, Partner Program Manager, Visual Studio Cloud Platform Tools Shahrokh Mortazavi currently works in the Developer Division of Microsoft on Python and Node.js tool chain. Previously, he was in the High Performance Computing group at Microsoft. He worked on the Phoenix Compiler tool chain (code gen, analysis, JIT) at Microsoft Research and for 10 years led Sun Microsystems’ Code Generation & Optimization compiler backend teams.