The Node.js Tools for Visual Studio are available under the Apache open source license. Microsoft continues it to be an early alpha release, so it still has some rough edges, but the early reviews ...

The January release of Visual Studio Code 1.9 is out with a bunch of fixes, updates and new features, including a new interactive playground that lets developers try out editing features immediately.

Microsoft has willingly created software code extensions that open its previously oh-so-proprietary central programming/editing software framework into a place to work with Node.js developer tools.