Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day

[DebuggerStepThrough] - Desktop applications with nodejs! ...as if winforms and wpf aren't dead already!

I used to disfavor javascript over other languages because it wasn't type-safe, it was hard to refactor, hard to write tests, find usages in the code, ...and the list goes on...

The past few years though, some amazing things have happened in the world that now make javascript an amazing language!

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And my personal favorite - NodeJS! This tool is amazing! It can do so many things from being a fully functional and scalable backend server to a framework for writing desktop applications.

While looking into the code of PopcornTime I realized it was written in nodejs, with a framework called node-webkit. ...

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The steps taken to create a simple desktop application with node-webkit are super-simple! (and easier than building a desktop application with any other language i've tried!)

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Start building your application just like you would a website. You can use the browser just like you're used to, to see your work.

When you want to start accessing node modules, you'll need to start running it with node-webkit.

In order to do this, just run the node-webkit executable from the command line with your main html file as a parameter.

C:\Utilities\node-webkit\nw.exe index.html

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rogerwang/node-webkit

Call all Node.js modules directly from DOM and enable a new way of writing applications with all Web technologies

Introduction

node-webkit is an app runtime based on Chromium and node.js. You can write native apps in HTML and JavaScript with node-webkit. It also lets you call Node.js modules directly from the DOM and enables a new way of writing native applications with all Web technologies.

It's created and developed in the Intel Open Source Technology Center.

Introduction to node-webkit (slides)
Creating Desktop Applications With node-webkit
WebApp to DesktopApp with node-webkit (slides)
Essay on the history and internals of the project

Features

• Apps written in modern HTML5, CSS3, JS and WebGL.
• Complete support for Node.js APIs and all its third party modules.
• Good performance: Node and WebKit runs in the same thread: Function calls are made straightforward; objects are in the same heap and can just reference each other;
• Easy to package and distribute apps.
• Available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows

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I'm not jumping out of my WPF world for this, nor do I see it taking on the future of Universal App's, but I still think this is a pretty cool project and idea. Security scares me a little, but hey, it always scares me a little... lol

Modulus - An Absolute Beginner's Guide to Node.js

There's no shortage of Node.js tutorials out there, but most of them cover specific use cases or topics that only apply when you've already got Node up and running. I see comments every once and awhile that sound something like, "I've downloaded Node, now what?" This tutorial answers that question and explains how to get started from the very beginning.

What is Node.js?

A lot of the confusion for newcomers to Node is misunderstanding exactly what it is. The description on nodejs.org definitely doesn't help.

An important thing to realize is that Node is not a webserver. By itself it doesn't do anything. It doesn't work like Apache. There is no config file where you point it to you HTML files. If you want it to be a HTTP server, you have to write an HTTP server (with the help of its built-in libraries). Node.js is just another way to execute code on your computer. It is simply a JavaScript runtime.

Installing Node

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A great guide for a guy like me who knows how to spell Node.js (mostly) but that's about it...

(via codeship - The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Node.js)

Microsoft Web Matrix 2

"WebMatrix is a free and lightweight web development tool. Create, publish, and maintain your website with ease.

Optimized for Open Source

Install popular web apps with a few clicks, customize them easily with app-specific code completion, and publish them quickly to the web. Learn More

Designed for Top Languages

Create websites using our ASP.NET, PHP, Node.js, or HTML5 templates, and take advantage of the latest web standards, emerging standards(CSS3, HTML5), and popular JavaScript libraries such as JQuery.

Built for the Cloud

Deploy your websites to and from Windows Azure Web Sites with a single click, edit them remotely or even download directly from the cloud.

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Vishal Joshi's Tangent  - WebMatrix 2 is Released

On June 6th, I announced  RC version of WebMatrix 2.   I highly encourage you to read the post Announcing WebMatrix 2 RC as it covers most of the new features that we are releasing.

I also encourage you to visit www.webmatrix.com which has tons of user documentation.

Since the June RC release we primarily focused on getting polish on the product and as part of this post I am hoping to highlight the key changes since WebMatrix 2 RC.  This post is not intended to be flashy but hopefully will give you an understanding of the effort that the team took in taking WebMatrix 2 from RC to RTM.

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The goal for the RTW release was not to add a ton of new features but to actually make only targeted changes to make your experience with the product even more awesome and raise the quality even more.  We had given “Go-Live” license with the RC release already but now hopefully there would be nothing stopping you upgrading from WebMatrix  1 to WebMatrix 2.  JFYI: we will soon turn on the “Upgrade” flag in WebMatrix which will prompt millions of users using WebMatrix 1 to move to WebMatrix 2.

WebMatrix 2 in my opinion is one of the best light weight web development tool out there.  With support for Node.js, PHP, ASP.NET, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, SQL CE, SQL Server, MySQL, FTP, Web Deploy, Less, ScSS, Coffee Script, SEO, iPhone/iPad simulators and many many other features there is no doubt that it is probably the best web editing tool that one could possibly get for FREE, so if you are not already using it I hope you give it a try by downloading it below:

Since WebMatrix 2 RC we fixed over 100 bugs, many of them reported on Stackoverflow and user voice. Thanks for the taking the time to report issues, and helping us make WebMatrix 2 even better.  Below are some notable fixes that went in between WebMatrix 2 RC and RTM:

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Nice to see the continued work on Web Matrix. Now to really impress me, they need to start working on v3 now... (oh and change the cadence to a more agile one... [well you can always hope...] :)

Anyway... If you're doing web dev and looking for a great tool that free, this is a must go to tool.

Related Past Post XRef:
WebMatrix 2 RC - HTML, CSS, Node.js, ASP.Net, Coffee, {Less} and so much more and still free...
WebMatrix v2 Beta is out...

Mikhail Arkhipov (MSFT)'s WebLog - WebMatrix v2 RC is out so it is time to revive this blog

"It has been a long while since I posted here. I've been silent since most of the things I've been working on were not public. NowWebMatrix v2 RC is out I can admit I have been working on most of its editor features: JavaScript, Node.js, HTML, CSS, {LESS}, SaSS, Jade, EJS, Classic ASP and so on. I am going to start series of posts on WebMatrix editor functionality, its relation to Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer Express and so on. WebMatrix v2 employs the same WPF based core editor surface that first appeared in Visual Studio 2010. This allows us to share features between VS, VWD and WebMatrix.

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53 Bytes - Node.js meet WebMatrix

After months of hard work by the WebMatrix team, it’s exciting to introduce the release candidate of WebMatrix 2. WebMatrix 2 includes tons of new features, but today I want to give an overview of the work we’ve done to enable building applications with Node.js.

If you want to skip all of this and just get a download link (it’s free!), here you go.

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Enter WebMatrix 2

Today, getting started with node.js is a relatively simple task. You install node, npm (which is now bundled with the node installers), and get started with your favorite text editor. There are infinite possibilities, and limitless configurations for managing projects, compiling CoffeeScript & LESS, configuring your production settings, and deploying your apps. WebMatrix 2 sets out to provide another way to build node.js apps: everything you need to build great apps is one place.

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Vishal Joshi's Tangent - Announcing WebMatrix 2 RC

WebMatrix is designed to build modern standards based websites as effortlessly as possible. It aims to make your web development workflow easy i.e.

• It lets you get started with Open Source web applications or with built in pretty templates like bakery, personal site, photo galleries, Chat application, Simple CMS etc.
• It comes bundled with a web server so you do not have to configure anything on your machine.
• It has top notch support for web & industry standards like HTML5 , CSS3, JavaScript & jQuery
• It supports server side scripting of your choice - may it be ASP.NET, PHP or Node.js
• It will have built in database management tools for SQL Server or MySQL
• It also has SEO tool & performance optimization tools.
• Finally, it has great publishing tools whether you are using FTP/FTPS or Web Deploy. And now it supports publishing to Windows Azure too!!

Essentially right from getting started till publishing, WebMatrix will make your life easy and will do so for FREE. What is nice is that even after all this it continues to be lightweight installs under 2 minutes (assuming you have .NET 4 which most machines do today).

Not to get lost in the noise, WebMatrix 2 RC was made available last week. Great to see Microsoft continue to invest in this tool and on it's new features, I have to say, "Wow"...

Bruno Terkaly - Developer Evangelist - bterkaly@microsoft.com - Node.js– A chat server written in Node and a client app written in C#

"A new twist to a boring Chat application

Most demos on Node.js illustrate how to create a chat server, but rarely provide the client side of the chat service.

That is what this post is about – creating both the server and client side of the equation.

Server	Node.js	Javascript
Client	.NET	C#

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I dug the walk-through nature of this as well as its focus on the C# client side. We see ton's of Node.JS stuff, but like Bruno says, not much on the client side of things. Kudo's to him for helping us out there... :)

Angel “Java” Lopez on Blog - Playing With NodeJs (1) Running on Windows (and Azure)

"Up until some weeks ago, the only way to run NodeJs on Windows were to download it from the Git repo and compile it using CygWin (another case of get the bananas AND get the monkey).

Building node.js on Cygwin (Windows)
How to install Node.js on Windows

But now there is an alternative: NodeJs team has published a Windows pre-compiled version (0.5.4 and 0.5.5):

http://nodejs.org/#download
http://nodejs.org/dist/
http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.5.4/node.exe
http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.5.5/node.exe

(there is a new version http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.5.5/node-186364e.exe)

I’m using the 0.5.4. Let’s run a simple demo that use Socket.IO:

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Node.Js is getting something of a following and some geek-press. I'm not jumping on it yet, but I am watching, especially now that there's a compiled binary...