Step 1: NPM Restore
Now that your project has been created, you should wait until all npm packages have been restored. This process will take some minutes depending on your machine and your internet connection speed.
In the Dependencies node you should see a "Restoring Packages.." message. If yo don't, you can always Right Click the Dependencies node and click on Restore Packages.
When the Package Restore has finished, you will have a new folder www\lib populated with ionic and angular libraries.
If you have any problem with this process, you can look for any error in the Output Window (Ctrl+Alt+O), under the Npm/Bower category.
Step 2: Execute Gulp Tasks with Task Runner Explorer
Ionic uses Gulp to perform some tasks like Sass to process your source code and produce the output in the www folder.
Visual Studio 2015 includes a Task Runner Explorer that will show you all the available tasks to execute from the UI. You can access the Task Runner Explorer from the Menu: View->Other Windows-Task Runner Explorer or with the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+Bkspce
This step is specially important since the TypeScript code is compiled to JavaScript using the tsc task. So any time you make any modification to your .ts files you should run your task to compile it again. You can also run the watch task to enable a Live Reload experience.
Note: To ensure that the default tasks are executed before the VS build, we configured the Task Runner Explorer binding the default gulp task to the BeforeBuild event, however you can customize this setting to match your needs (e.g. Binding watch to Project Opened event)