JS Stack circa 2013Q4

A few technologies that have crystalized in the last couple years really help bring javascript development up to parity with how robust things were under Silverlight & C#/.Net framework.

• nuget - the tight integration that nuget brings to our whole universe is huge... at first nuget was new and like, neat that's "handy"... but at this point it would be total madness w/o it... searchable repository where all these new libraries are easily managed ... easy to check versions and update to the latest... bringing all these scripting dependencies into a project as formal "references" (just like .Net assemblies) really helps keep you out of javascript hell
• requires.js - a fairly automatic "include"/dependency management system for all the interdependent JS libs that have to get pulled into the client at runtime... it used to just be jQuery but the JS lib stack has exploded out into literally dozens of includes that all piggyback eachother and w/o a management wrapper around that we'd have to get the <script> file references in the correct order on every browser page... another big potential for madness avoided
• bundling & minification - the latest VS2012 MVC project templates come bundled with support for taking all these raw scripts and bundling them into one big file, this means the web client is only making one optimal request for it's "framework" rather than 20 async requests for each individual script library before it can start rendering the dang page page ... that big file is also "minified", meaning all the white space is removed so it's as small of a network download as possible... both of those together are pretty huge in the new scheme of things
• "LESS" - basically CSS syntax revamped to support variables and generally less repetitive syntax ... it's a huge deal when you want to set some basic highlight colors & metrics and have everything else reference those as variables so that it's easy to change your look and feel by tweaking the core variables used in all the other element styles... it's easy to configure your MVC project to automatically compile LESS into native CSS for the browser to consume what it understands... there are other CSS wrapper syntaxes out there... SASS is another one
• make sure you get the VS 2012 Web Essentials add on - it does all kinds of handy little nice to haves like automatically showing you you a little image popup when you hover over a reference (in CSS as well)... shows html color tags with a little color block popup... etc. etc.
• Resharper - resharper is one of those cool kitchen sync productivity boosters that really makes me feel like i'm driving on jet fuel in visual studio... the automatic syntax cleaning it does... robust javascript parsing / intellisense / reference navigation and on and on