Microsoft, Joyent, and project lead Ryan Dahl today announced that they would be working together to bring node.js to Windows. node.js is a high-performance asynchronous environment for building network servers. It combines the V8 JavaScript engine created by Google for its Chrome browser with an event-driven system for handling requests.

node.js has rapidly become popular, wedding a high-level language to a style of development that has traditionally been the preserve of more complex, lower-level programs. Its current design is, however, highly dependent on I/O facilities found on UNIX-like systems (in one form or another—even in the UNIX world there are substantial differences). Though it can be used under the Cygwin environment, using it this way forfeits the performance that is one of the key features of node.js. An effort to provide a first-class port to Windows started earlier this year, and that effort will now be aided by Microsoft.

There's no release date or official schedule yet, but source commits from Redmond are expected to start rolling in soon.

The plan is to make node.js available to Windows Server 2003 and newer. Microsoft also plans to ensure that it works well with its Windows Azure cloud platform. On the subject of Azure, a couple of days ago the company announced pricing changes to Azure to encourage companies to use it to store their data. From July 1st, all inbound data transfers, whether on- or off-peak, will be free.