Rich client-side applications for ASP.NET backends

While Visual Studio is an excellent IDE for writing .NET code, its web-development features are years behind the rich ecosystem growing around Node.js.

There's no secret that the vast majority of .NET web-developers are mostly server-side-oriented people still thinking browser coding is "sissy stuff" to be written by designers. Well, not anymore in the 21st century.

But - preconceptions aside, since Node.js is now working fairly well on Windows, ASP.NET projects can benefit from modern client-side development tools such as Gulp, browserify / watchify, Stylus-based CSS pre-processing, Livereload magic... Not to mention rich client-side applications based on Backbone.js or Ampersand.js which would be impossible to build without leveraging the power of CommonJS.

The good news is that - although Visual Studio is severely lacking in terms of JavaScript / modern CSS development, it is possible to accommodate a Gulp-based development scenario in your workflow.

For more information, have a look at this sample repository I've set up on GitHub: github.com/icflorescu/gulp-js-with-nancy-fx.