Trying SPFx Tutorial 5 without VS2015 installed

Question

I have set up my Windows 10 Machine for SPFx development. I am using Visual Studio Code and not Visual Studio itself.

NB When you install Python (Setting up your machine) it needs .NET 2.0 to be alreafdy installed on your machine)

When get to Step 3 (npm i --save jquery) I get a failure - MSBUILD : error MSB3428: Could not load the Visual C++ component "VCBuild.exe". To fix this, 1) install the .NET Framework 2.0 SDK, 2) install Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 or 3) add the location of the component to the system path if it is installed elsewhere. [C:\xxxxxxx\Documents\SPFx\Projects\jquery-webpart\node_modules\utf-8-validate\build\binding.sln]

After a bit of digging around I found this - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14278417/cannot-install-node-modules-that-require-compilation-on-windows-7-x64-vs2012

So I downloaded the Microsoft Build Tools 2013 (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40760)

I set the global flag to use the 2013 version. (npm config set msvs_version 2013 --global)

The above error went away when I ran npm i --save jquery again but it was replaced with C:\xxxxxx\Documents\SPFx\Projects\jquery-webpart\node_modules\bufferutil\build\bufferutil.vcxproj(20,3): error MSB4019: The imported project "C:\Microsoft.Cpp.Default.props" was not found. Confirm that the path in the declaration is correct, and that the file exists on disk.

Further Info - gyp ERR! stack Error: C:\Program Files (x86)\MSBuild\12.0\bin\msbuild.exe failed with exit code: 1 gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess.onExit (C:\xxxxxxxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\npm\node_modules\node-gyp\lib\build.js:276:23) gyp ERR! stack at emitTwo (events.js:87:13) gyp ERR! stack at ChildProcess.emit (events.js:172:7) gyp ERR! stack at Process.ChildProcess._handle.onexit (internal/child_process.js:200:12)

Any Ideas how I get jquery to compile ??

Thanks

Nigel

Answer 1

Solution: upgrade npm to v3:

    npm -g install npm@next 
    npm install --global --production windows-build-tools 

and it worked ! - I was able to compile the jquery example.

Hopefully these two lines will be added to the "Setup your machine" where python is set up or in Tutorial 5.

(Thanks to Gavin Barron who said to run the npm upgrade commands)