Installing frontend tools and dependencies
For any kind of modern frontend development, we're going to need Node and Node Package Manager (npm) installed. Node itself is a runtime built on top of Chrome's V8 engine, enabling us to run JavaScript on the server side of our applications. So, why do we need it if we're using ASP.NET Core?
Node and npm are both requirements of the tooling used to build and run medium-large scale Vue applications. We'll also be using npm to install a lot of client-side packages that we'll use within the application itself.
Installing Node and npm
Head on over to the following URL and download the Node.js installer (https://nodejs.org/en/). The website should be smart enough to detect your OS and provide the right platform installer for you, which in my case is Windows (x64). You have two options to choose from, the LTS version or the Current version. I'll be sticking with the LTS version, which at the time of writing is version 8.9.3.
To test that Node has been...