Earlier this week, I attended CapArea (Capital Area .NET User’s Group) in northern Virginia. The topic was “Node for .NET Developers”, presented by Kevin Griffin.
As you may know, Node js is a server-side JavaScript platform, based on Google’s V8 JavaScript Engine. If you’re familiar with JavaScript, you will feel right at home with Node.js on the server.
Kevin Griffin is a software developer from Chesapeake, VA, and is available for hire and in-person training. He also provides server monitoring through Winsitter.
Here are the topics we covered during the session:
- JavaScript: Everyone’s favorite client-side scripting language, which has been available on the server for a while now. We learned about how to debug the server-side script and set breakpoints using Chrome’s Developer Tools.
- Multiplatform: Node.js is available for many popular platforms, including Windows, MacOS, Linux and SunOS.
- Require: Use the global require() method to load code modules in your code.
- Npm: Node Packaged Modules (aka npm) is the official package manager for node.js, much like NuGet for .NET applications.
- Express: ExpressJS is a web application framework for node.js, that makes it even easier to build web applications using node.
- Module.exports: this allows you to expose objects and methods from your code modules
- Underscore: Think of underscore.js as Linq for JavaScript.
- Lodash: Not happy with Underscore’s performance? Swap out Underscore for Lodash, a faster alternative.
- Azure: Need a place to host your code? Check out Azure, Microsoft’s cloud service.
- Cloud9: Need an IDE in the cloud? Cloud9 is an online IDE which has both a free offering and commercial subscriptions available.
- JavaScript frameworks: We discussed other JavaScript frameworks briefly, such as AngularJS.
For more information on Node.js from Kevin, check out his posts on his blog:
http://www.kevgriffin.com/tag/node-js/