Installing Node.js

Visual Studio provides great support for developing programs using Node.js. To configure the Node.js development environment on the Windows platform, download and install Node.js from http://nodejs.org. There are various installers available as per the platform, as shown in the following screenshot:

For Windows, we will download the 64-bit Windows installer that downloads the .msi package and take you through some simple wizard screens. You will notice that the Node.js installer contains a runtime to run node programs and NPM to reference other Node modules in your program. This can be seen in the following screenshot:

Commands such as npm and node are already added in the environment path and we can execute these commands directly from the command prompt. Therefore, if we open the command prompt and write node, it will give you the Node prompt, which allows you to write JavaScript code on the fly and execute, as shown in the following screenshot:

Alternatively, we can also...