Open source projects also appear with other tools and languages such as Node.js, now used as another type of project from Visual Studio (any version), Python, PHP, or Apache/Cordova. All these technologies are now part of the installable/programmable projects available from the IDE. This goes for GitHub as well, whose engineers collaborate to integrate it better with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

In the case of Node.js, you have to install the templates for Visual Studio (a one-time, pretty straightforward operation), and you will be shown several templates when you select in to build a new project, as shown in the following screenshot:

If you work with one of these projects, you'll discover that common tools on other platforms are, by default, available here as well, such as Grunt, Bower, NPM. Gulp, and so on.

Just for the sake of completeness, let's perform a basic demo of Node.js with these templates and see how it works. If you select Basic Node.js Express Application, a whole application will be generated from the templates, including the files required to launch a working instance of Node.js and a simple web page that uses Node as the localhost web server.

By default, the project uses the Express library, which works seamlessly with Node. The view engine is also the most common one in these projects (it's called Jade, and you can change it at any time or use one of the alternatives available).

When reviewing the files generated, you'll notice a number of libraries that have been downloaded and updated in our project. This is the result of the IDE's interaction with the package.json configuration file, which establishes the libraries that the application depends on:

{
  "name": "ExpressApp1",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "description": "ExpressApp1",
  "main": "app.js",
  "author": {
    "name": "Marino",
    "email": ""
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "express": "3.4.4",
    "jade": "*",
    "stylus": "*"
  }
}

This file instructs the IDE to download all libraries required and all the dependencies these libraries rely upon.

At launch, two windows will open. On the one hand, Console will open, and on the other hand, an instance of the default browser will open. In the console, Node.js is listening on two ports: the debugging port [5858] and the Express port [1337], which take care of web requests, as shown in the following screenshot:

As you can see in the preceding figure, two requests have been made at runtime: the rendered page (which Jade generates from the basic source code in the index.jade file) and the style sheet, which was referenced in the layout.jade file that serves as the master page in this demo. Both worked fine (200 status).

On the other hand, the resulting page from mixing these two .jade files (the actual master or the main page) is shown in the selected browser (note that you can select more than one browser to create a multi-browser debugging session):

Independently of the aspects of Node.js programming and its tools, you'll observe that the tool's support is very complete, so we can even mix projects that use different technologies in a single solution, and we don't depend on an installation of IIS for debugging purposes anymore:

Other remarkable areas where the community is very active in the Microsoft Open Source ecosystem are as follows:

And, many, many more