As the company continues to court programmers developing on software stacks that aren't its own, Microsoft has released a plugin for Visual Studio that provides extensive support for Node.js within the Visual Studio IDE.

The Apache-licensed Node.js Tools for Visual Studio offer editing with IntelliSense, Node.js projects, debugging, profiling, and deployment, all inside Microsoft's IDE. The plugin also includes a graphical interface to Node's NPM package manager, so Node libraries can be downloaded from the NPM repository, again from within Visual Studio.

Though still only an "alpha" release, the development experience looks remarkably complete already. The plugin is plumbed into the V8 debugger and profiling APIs that Node already uses, so it should provide consistent results and capabilities as Node developers not using the plugin will have.

Microsoft's Scott Hanselman has a post looking at the plugin in more detail with a whole bunch of screenshots.