Node Windows Hackathon: Improving the Node Experience on Windows

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Posted by Amy Green
Director, Worldwide Marketing and Operations

Recently the Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. team hosted the first Node Windows Hackathon, bringing together Node.js developers to learn about new tools and work together on innovative scenarios and features.

 

“Our goal for the hackathon was simply to begin fostering a community of Node developers we can work with to make the Node experience on Windows and Windows Azure better and better over time,” said Doug Mahugh, Lead Technical Evangelist for Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. “We were very happy with the connections we made and the energy that everyone brought to the event.”

The hackathon was the inaugural event in a state-of-the-art Microsoft Garage facility and was available round-the-clock to the 50 attendees, who ranged from novice Node developers to Node experts. Several worked most of the night on their projects with impressive results. Here are a few of the projects presented after 24 hours of hacking:

  • Polyominus, a real-time multi-player board game with an HTML5 client that communicates with a Node service running on Windows Azure, built by Nick Price, Alex Swan and Rob Smith.
  • A game that pits two players against one another in the form of characters determined by their Github repository activity. Project team Kirk Kohler, Adam Mosher and Jianguo “JJ” Jiang based their work on the Repo Rancher concept originated by John Harrison.
  • NodeMetrics, a metric collection and visualization tool that features an Express-based reporting tool to show a graphical representation of collected stats, built by Hakon Verespej, Ian Molee, Sirius Strebe and Adam Cox.

The hackathon coincided with the alpha release of Node.js Tools for Visual Studio (NTVS), a free open source plugin that turns Visual Studio into a Node.js integrated development environment. Dino Viehland, Principal Developer on the NTVS team, demonstrated several features of NTVS, including debugging capabilities for both local and remote code running on Windows or Linux servers.

Thanks to the many partners and Node community members who made the event a success! For the complete recap of the event, please see the MS Open Tech blog. Let us know about your Node projects in the comments.