Start the localhosting explicitly

[ohritz]

Instead of the localhost magically starting from changing the environment.json value to true.
A more explicit method is preferable, a npm command or an action in the contextual menu in VS, preferably with its own logging ui.

Currently it is very hard to determine if it is running, and if its not see why it might not be running.
If it stops, a more direct way of starting it again would be preferable.

As I'm not prevvy to how its implemented now I dont know how valid this idea is, but personally, it would be nice to have it work in a similar way as most frontend toolings work nowadays, such as "ng serve" from the angular cli, or "npm start" scripts kicking of a webpack-dev-server or something similar.
Runing it from its own process either in a powershell/cmd/bash/cmder window would allow for instant feedback of compilation, requests and errors.

configurations in environment.json could even allow for providing paths to own certificate files.