You forgot to mention TypeScript
which this new product claims to support, though why Microsoft would choose to do that for free I don'.... oh
Microsoft has doubled down on its support for the Node.js server-side JavaScript framework with a new set of tools that turn Visual Studio into a full-fledged Node.js IDE. The Node.js Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS) have been in development as an open source project for around a year, but Wednesday's 1.0 release marks them …
Microsoft will support it enthusiastically for a bit, then start to add 'advance' features on the backend that only work (or work best) with their backend kit. Then after a few more free years these differences will gradually increase, until they will start to gently penalise developers (in how code is executed) for not using the Microsoft features.
Bog standard big company practice. They don't want to be part of a community they want to own it (and bill it).
This took about 5 seconds to implement for Microsoft. In most editors, you can set breakpoints on any language. Node is Javascript with new API's, nothing else. Node isn't a hard scripting language to learn because Javascript isn't (just use the right parts).
BTW, I thought Node didn't run completely stable or functional on Windows yet, or has that changed?
So now we have the most pointless editor add-on for the most pointless idea ever conceived by mankind (being able to write programs in a shitty language totally unadapted for the task at hand in locations where you certainly do NOT want to see it, ever, and performing extreme gyrations that probe new depths of the saying "reinventing the square wheel" to attain that dubious privilege), thus surpassing muzzles for ducks.
Carry on.
Javascript is not a shitty language. Its problems are twofold: lack of documentation and adoption by the masses who just want to get jQuery working without caring how.
Go learn about the prototyping capabilities of Javascript to understand it's true power and potential. For those who understand this prototyping language, combined with the async nature of Node.js, it is a very powerful environment for async server tasks (i.e. most web services).