To get around this on my machine I did this command to install the package:
npm install socket.io --msvs_version=2012
I found the answer here when having the problem with installing sqlite3 and it worked with socket.io as well.
These might be more permanent solutions to fix the problem:
- Install Visual Studio 2010
- Updating the npm internal copy to a newer version of node-gyp as described here and here (probably the better option although I didn’t get it working but didn’t try for too long)