First Stable Build of Node.js on Windows Released

Great news for all Node.js developers wanting to use Windows: today we reached an important milestone - v0.6.0 – which is the first official stable build that includes Windows support.

This comes some four months after our June 23rd announcement that Microsoft was working with Joyent to port Node.js to Windows. Since then we’ve been heads down writing code.

Those developers who have been following our progress on GitHub know that there have been Node.js builds with Windows support for a while, but today we reached the all-important v.6.0 milestone.

This accomplishment is the result of a great collaboration with Joyent and its team of developers. With the dedicated team of Igor Zinkovsky, Bert Belder and Ben Noordhuis under the leadership of Ryan Dahl, we were able to implement all the features that let Node.js run natively on Windows.

And, while we were busy making the core Node.js runtime run on Windows, the Azure team was working on iisnode to enable Node.js to be hosted in IIS.

Among other significant benefits, Windows native support gave Node.js significant performance improvements as reported by Ryan on the Node.js.org blog. 

Node.js developers on Windows will also be able to rely on NPM to install the modules they need for their application. Isaac Schlueter from the Joyent team is currently working on porting NPM on Windows, and an early experimental version is already available on GitHub. The good news is that soon we’ll have a stable build integrated in the Node.js installer for Windows.

So stay tuned for more news on this front.

Claudio Caldato

Principal Program Manager, Interoperability Strategy Team