ES6 + TypeScript + Babel + React + Karma: The Secret Recipe

Getting started

You'll need node / npm and tsd installed globally. To get up and running just enter:

npm install
tsd install
npm run watch

This will:

1. Download the npm packages you need
2. Download the typings from DefinitelyTyped that you need.
3. Compile the code and serve it up at http://localhost:8080

Now you need dev tools. There's a world of choice out there; there's Atom, there's VS Code, there's Sublime. There's even something called Visual Studio. It's all your choice really.

For myself I've been using Atom combined with the mighty atom-typescript package. I advise you to give it a go. You won't look back.

I want to have an ASP.Net project and use Visual Studio + IIS Express to serve this instead

If you drop this code into a Visual Studio ASP.Net project should should be good to go. You'll need this section in your web.config to ensure Visual Studio serves from the dist directory:

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
      <rules>
        <rule name="Map all requests to 'dist' directory" stopProcessing="true">
          <match url="^(.*)$" />
          <action type="Rewrite" url="/dist/{R:1}" />
        </rule>
      </rules>
    </rewrite>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

And rather than running npm run serve you'll want to use npm run watch. (This builds / watches your code / runs tests etc but does not spin up a web server.)