New - AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio

If you are the kind of developer who likes to live in your IDE, you'll really appreciate the new AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio. We've provided you with enough power and control to allow you to develop, test, deploy, and maintain your applications without leaving Visual Studio.

The toolkit is a small (3.5 MB) download for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. Here are the download links:

• AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio (Visual Studio Extension Gallery).
• AWS SDK for .Net (Nuget Package Repository).

The AWS SDK for .NET is installed by default when you install the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio:

After installation you can activate the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio by selecting AWS Explorer from Visual Studio's View menu:

The AWS Explorer looks like this:

You can add one or more AWS accounts to the AWS Toolkit, and you can switch between them with ease:

Once you have added an account or two, you can use the tree view of the AWS Explorer to see the AWS resources associated with the account, arranged by type. You can right-click on the service name to create new resources, and you can double-click on a node to open a tab that contains more detailed information:

You can see and edit your CloudFront distributions, your S3 buckets, your SimpleDB domains, your SNS topics, and your SQS queues. There are context (right-click) menus for many common operations:

You can even run SimpleDB queries:

You can also launch and manage CloudFormation stacks:

And IAM users:

You can, of course, use the AWS SDK for .NET to create AWS applications from within Visual Studio. You start by creating an AWS project:

After you build your project, can simply right-click on it in the Solution Explorer and then deploy it to AWS:

You can choose between a number of templates, select an AWS account, and even a Region:

And there you have it! What do you think?

-- Jeff;

Comments

[William Clements]

This looks very impressive, guys! Nice work. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

Will

[James Stanley]

This is fantastic. The command line-challenged will rejoice!

[El_ranu]

Hi,
this is great! I just test it with my first deployments and works great! I have tested de load balanced template. How can I easily change a autoscaling parameter? Let's say my MaxSize in autoscaling is 2, and I want to change it to 4? Also I cannot select default instance, why? When I use the load balanced template is using cloudwach for each instance, isn't 'it?
This release is great Thanks!

[Eddie Vic]

Actually, how very *non* innovative for a company (Amazon) that lives, breathes, eats, sleeps the cloud. Why not do something more progressive (something that NeXT back it the 1990s would do, for example such as when they introduced Project Builder and Interface Builder on NeXTSTEP). For example instead of providing an SDK based on a traditional IDE (a proprietary one offered by your headquarters neighbor in Redmond), how about instead taking the IDE to the cloud itself? Nope, instead of really thinking outside the box (an overused meme), AWS simply perpetuates a legacy crusty IDE model that does nothnig more than generate more revenue for Microsoft. What a lackluster snoozer.

[Mehdi Mousavi]

Impressive!
Thank you for sharing...

[Doobiaus]

Absolutely awesome, that you!

Your support for .Net developers is fantastic, light years ahead of any other "Open" platform, and in many ways ahead of Microsoft themselves :)

[Christopher Abichandani]

I think it's great that you put together an add-in for such a popular IDE. I haven't gotten a chance to check it out yet, but by the presentation here, it's clearly the result of a lot of careful thinking and hard work. Thanks for putting in the long hours that were surely involved. Regardless of any brash criticism you might get, I'd wager the majority of us are very appreciative.