When you install Visual Studio 2017 it very kindly gives you the option to install Node.js

The only problem with this is that if you are not using v15.3 (or greater) of VS2017 then working with Azure Functions can present a couple of unusal issues.

• Not being able to install the Azure Client Tools.
• My application not being able to read from the local.settings.json file using the WebConfigurationManager.

The problem turned out to be the version of Node.js that was installed with Visual Studio and that I needed to update it to a more recent version. After completing the updated installation I was able to install the Azure tools and successfully read values from my local.settings.json file in my local development environment.