title: How to debug node.js application with Visual Studio 2013 and Node Tools NTVS
body: <p>I have moved an existing node.js + express project to VS because I prefer the IDE over JetBrains for now (used VS for years, only peeked into Webstorm).</p>
  
  <p>I used NTVS new project->from existing sources and all files were imported successfully.</p>
  
  <p>Afterwards, I opened the project settings of my project and set the node.exe arguments to bin\www, startup file for express.</p>
  
  <p><strong>When I press F5 (debug) I get the console.log messages I have put into the www and app.js files in the opening command prompt, and it looks like the server is running (cannot confirm, I want to debug if everything is working), but the VS debugger directly exits again, it also does not open any page in the browser I selected for debugging.</strong></p>
  
  <p>My node app actually is a REST webservice, so I want to test different URLs with different parameters.</p>
  
  <p>Also, I cannot access the app on the port I specified, though when I directly start it from node.exe I can, even though the command prompt is still open.</p>
  
  <p>(I have NTVS and WebEssentials installed - some operations take a long long time, but I attribute this to NTVS being still an early version.)</p>
  
  <p>Question: <strong>how does the Visual Studio debugger stay connected to the node.js application so I can use breakpoints and use any browser then to connect and test different URLs?</strong> (Even a breakpoint put on the console.log that gets printed during startup is not being triggered.)</p>