A month ago we launched Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 at our launch event (http://www.visualstudiolaunch.com) in Seattle. At this event and online, we had a number of sessions showing how Visual Studio 2012 helps you build great applications.

We are always looking to ensure that our new tools can be adopted by our users, and have invested in areas like Project Round Tripping to smooth the process. We are fortunate to have a large and diverse community of fans and partners producing extensions and add-ins to Visual Studio that users depend on, and expect to be able to use them on the latest version. We got clear feedback when Visual Studio 2010 shipped about the absence of these extensions and add-ins early on.

In this release we wanted to remove this obstacle to quick adoption. We brought together the 72 partners who have the most widely used add-ins and extensions to work closely with us and ship versions of their products that work seamlessly with Visual Studio 2012. We delivered interim builds to these partners during the development cycle of Visual Studio so they could develop and test their extensions. Not only did our partners use those builds but they also provided us with interim builds of their products so we could improve Visual Studio’s interaction with them. We’d like to thank our Launch Partners for their efforts, ensuring users will be able to start using Visual Studio 2012 with their extensions right way.

(http://www.vsipprogram.com)

The best way to get an extension for Visual Studio is to visit the Visual Studio Gallery. You can do this either from your browser (http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/) or from inside the product using the Extensions and Updates Manager:

Many of the extensions are available in trial formats so you can find the extension that best suits your needs.

When you visit the Visual Studio Gallery, you’ll see that we currently have 3,400 extensions available for various Visual Studio releases and over 650 of them supporting Visual Studio 2012 specifically. One of the strengths of Visual Studio is this deep community involvement that extends the product and brings our users additional capabilities. We are always interested in seeing more extensions!

Thank you!

The Visual Studio Team