Don't know how it happened, but VS2013 + NTVS RC2 got itself in a tizzy, and the project as a whole kept trying to refresh itself, over and over. An obvious manifestation of this was if I expanded a node in the Solution Explorer (say the npm node, and its subnodes), then a second or two later the tree would be collapsed, and the project item would become the selected item in the Solution Explorer. I expand the tree... then it collapses, over and over.
Closing then re-opening VS didn't solve. Only by rebooting the machine did I get it to stop doing this. Now I can't repro it... but I thought I'd mention it anyway, in case someone else has seen something like this.
Comments: Update will run ```npm update --save```. When you do that, your package state will be as if you had deployed to a server without 'node_modules' and installed your dependencies. If you don't want to upgrade Express, I recommend specifying the version range you want to use in package.json, as described [here](https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package.json#dependencies). Think of npm more like nuget than like "references" in a c# project. In that sense, it's not so different from nuget's upgrade functionality. The only difference is that it's exposed through solution explorer rather than a separate UI. Good point about initiating a long-running operation that you're unable to cancel, especially since it prevents you from using other npm commands. Maybe we could offer the cancel functionality without the use of a modal dialog, though (e.g. run the command in an interactive window, y'know - once we implement cancellation and also allow for multiple interactive windows...) Anyways, those are probably not changes that are within scope of the upcoming 1.0 release so we can hold off on the brainstorming for a bit - the more pressing issue is this weird project refresh issue that you ran into, as it signifies a deeper issue at play. Can you consistently reproduce this? I can only reproduce the npm node children refreshing weirdly, but not the entire project node's children.
Closing then re-opening VS didn't solve. Only by rebooting the machine did I get it to stop doing this. Now I can't repro it... but I thought I'd mention it anyway, in case someone else has seen something like this.
Comments: Update will run ```npm update --save```. When you do that, your package state will be as if you had deployed to a server without 'node_modules' and installed your dependencies. If you don't want to upgrade Express, I recommend specifying the version range you want to use in package.json, as described [here](https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package.json#dependencies). Think of npm more like nuget than like "references" in a c# project. In that sense, it's not so different from nuget's upgrade functionality. The only difference is that it's exposed through solution explorer rather than a separate UI. Good point about initiating a long-running operation that you're unable to cancel, especially since it prevents you from using other npm commands. Maybe we could offer the cancel functionality without the use of a modal dialog, though (e.g. run the command in an interactive window, y'know - once we implement cancellation and also allow for multiple interactive windows...) Anyways, those are probably not changes that are within scope of the upcoming 1.0 release so we can hold off on the brainstorming for a bit - the more pressing issue is this weird project refresh issue that you ran into, as it signifies a deeper issue at play. Can you consistently reproduce this? I can only reproduce the npm node children refreshing weirdly, but not the entire project node's children.