Download Visual Studio 2012 For Mac

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When the Visual Studio 2012 free versions were originally announced the first thing I noticed was that they had switched from a language-specific model (C# Express, VB Express, etc) to a target-specific model (Windows 8, Web). However, I was very surprised (and disappointed) that there was no free way to make Console Apps, or Windows Forms apps, or anything for the Windows Desktop. I wasn't the only one who thought this was a problem. Shortly thereafter (with a lot of people pushing) Soma announced there would be a 'Windows Desktop' Express version for free. He said:

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..we heard from our community that developers want to have for Windows desktop development the same great experience and access to the latest Visual Studio 2012 features at the Express level.

Today, I’m happy to announce that we will add Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop to the Visual Studio 2012 family. This will bring to the Visual Studio Express family significant new capabilities that we’ve made available in Visual Studio 2012 for building great desktop applications.

I'm glad folks realized that no-cost desktop software development is important. Open Source projects need free tools like the Express SKUs. Even better that the the Express Desktop SKU gets the new 2012 features as well.

Today Visual Studio has made Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop available and you can go download it now free. The best part is that this one SKU supports C++, C#, and Visual Basic together. With this one free version you can make WinForms, WPF, Console or Class Libraries with any or all of Visual Basic, C#, as well as Win32 projects, class libraries, and CLR apps using C++. You can also, of course, combine projects over multiple languages into a single solution. You can target both .NET 4.0 and 4.5.

NOTE: You might wonder, what about a free F#? Why isn't F# included? We've got a free download to add F# support to the free Visual Studio Express 2012 for Web!

Related Links

• Download page for Visual Studio 2012 for Windows Desktop (Web Installer or ISO)
• F# Tools for Visual Studio 2012 Express for Web (you *don't* need this if you have Pro already, this is just for Express for Web)

While Express SKUs don't allow arbitrary add-ins (you need Pro for that) the free SKU does include Unit Testing, Code Analysis, as well as the NuGet package manager. It's a bit of a nice coup for my little group that NuGet is now included in ALL Visual Studio 2012 SKUs, even Express ones. Package management is finally happening in .NET.

In the screenshot below I've added a C++ Console app, a Window Forms C# app and a C# Console to a single solution in VS2012 using Express for Windows Desktop.

Just to illustrate one of the reasons I think a free 'Desktop' SKU is so important, I wanted to share a cool open source project I found recently called Topshelf. It's a library for making Windows Services easier to write using .NET. It's up on GitHub under an Apache license. The easiest way to get Topshelf is with NuGet with simply 'install-package Topshelf'. Topshelf has some impressive documentation as well, especially for an open source project!

Here's a simple Windows Service with a basic heartbeat timer using Topshelf:

Topshelf even has nice Log4net and NLog integration. Anyway, this is just the kind of powerful, useful, and interesting open source library that could be helped by a free Express SKU for Desktop. I'm not involved directly (yet ;) ) in making decisions this high up, but I (and many, many others) inside and out continue to advocate for balance. In this case I'm very glad that the decision was made to ship this SKU and I hope you all find it useful whether you work in open source or in education.

There's more details over at the Visual Studio blog and the team is watching the comments.

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About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio is an extension for Microsoft Visual Studio running on Microsoft Windows that makes it easier for developers to develop, debug, and deploy .NET applications using Amazon Web Services. With the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio, you'll be able to get started faster and be more productive when building AWS applications.

The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio is available via the Visual Studio Marketplace and supports Visual Studio 2017 and 2019. The AWS Toolkit for 2013 and 2015 is contained in the AWS SDK and Tools for .NET install package.

At this time, the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio does not support Visual Studio for Mac.

Legacy version downloads:
AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2010-2012
AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio 2008

The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio conveniently includes the AWS SDK for .NET, so you can get started building .NET applications on AWS infrastructure services in Visual Studio, including Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Easily create new .NET projects with the AWS .NET library by using one of the included project templates, or add the library to an existing project.

Use Visual Studio to build and debug your applications.

Create, view, and delete Amazon S3 objects, Amazon DynamoDB items and attributes, Amazon SQS messages, and more.

Add, edit, and delete resources to help build and test your application without leaving the IDE.

Create queries against your data in Amazon DynamoDB and edit the results.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Use the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio to develop, debug, then deploy your .NET web applications using a web application template. Use Visual Studio to build and run your application locally before deploying to AWS Elastic Beanstalk. Learn more »

Bullguard free download. AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway
Create serverless applications with minimal administration and event-driven scaling with C# and Node.js using AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway.

Amazon Elastic Container Service
Easily build, register and deploy .NET Core Docker applications to the Amazon Elastic Container Service without ever leaving Visual Studio. Learn More »

AWS Explorer
The AWS Explorer lets you manage your AWS resources. Including your Amazon S3 Objects, Amazon DynamoDB Tables and EC2 instances.

CloudFormation Editor
Create new .NET web applications using an application template. Use Visual Studio to build with the convenience of IntelliSense and deploy to AWS with AWS CloudFormation. Learn more »

Project Templates
The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio includes project templates for AWS Lambda functions, AWS CloudFormation templates and sample projects showing how to use various AWS services.

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