Mar072016

Visual Studio and Node - Set Proper External Web Tools Path Order

A problem that my team has been running into on-and-off since working with ASP.NET Core is having a local install of our node toolchain fighting with Visual Studio's built-in version of node. Luckily, my coworker discovered the source of the issue (thanks, Pete!).

In Visual Studio, there is an option for external web tool lookup paths. By default, they look like this:

Visual Studio External Web Tool Paths: Default

By changing the order and giving our $(PATH) precedence over Visual Studio's built-in tools, we can ensure that our standard node toolchain gets used before the built-in Visual Studio toolchain (which has a much older version of node and other utilities). Our recommendation is to have the $(PATH) second in order:

Visual Studio External Web Tool Paths: Revised

This appears to have resolved our issue (ours was specifically around libsass bindings, since Visual Studio used a different architecture).