Dependencies not installed in Visual Studio

This is still an issue in Visual Studio Community 2015, Update 3 edition when creating an ASP.NET Core Web Application (.NET Framework 4.5.2) using the the Empty ASP.NET Core Template. It does appear to function properly when creating the project using the ASP.NET Core Web Application Template.

As the op mentioned the message is misleading since the dependencies are installed. It seems to be just a misreporting by Visual Studio that the npm and the dependencies are not installed. The temporary fix is to override where Visual Studio is looking for node.js, which removes the not installed messages in visual studio.

In Visual Studio go to Tools > Options > Projects and Solutions > External Web Tools and add a path to your installation of node.js. This is by default located at C:\Program Files\nodejs\ or C:\Program Files (x86)\nodejs\ Move this new line to the top or at least above the $(VSINSTALLDIR)\Web\External line.

Restore your packages and the error message should go away.

I think this is known problem with RC2 reported in asp github

https://github.com/aspnet/Tooling/issues/479

I think the functionality should work but the message is wrong soprobably we need to wait until they solve the problem.

This appears to be due to the fact that NPM produces a warning about a component that cannot be installed, such as an OSX component if you're on windows. VS interprets this as a failure, when it's really not.More details here.