I vividly remember penning the blog post announcing the Visual Studio Extensions for WSS (VSeWSS 1.2) .  Love them or hate them VSeWSS was the first MS foray into integrated developer tooling for SharePoint developers.  In all honesty VSeWSS was a skunk works project started by some folks in the SharePoint and SPD engineering team.  I inherited them when Alex Malek moved to the IE team.  For the 2010 release I worked pretty closely with Mike Morton from the VS team on what became the SharePoint tooling that you see today.  I am sure Mike and team hit their heads on a wall with the number of times I said we needed features like a content type and list visual designer vs. just XML.  We literally had a feature list 100s of items long and only resources to do ~30 in the first version. We eventually got the list designer a release or so later 🙂

Now we have the next major iteration of those tools that have just released for SharePoint and Office 2013!

Read the announcement here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/somasegar/archive/2013/03/04/now-available-office-developer-tools-for-visual-studio-2012.aspx

Randall also has a write up on them here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeapps/archive/2013/03/05/download-the-office-and-sharepoint-visual-studio-tools.aspx

They come complete with fancy colored icons in the new project picker!  (the preview was grey scale). I laugh … but the grey pissed me off for some reason.

Personally I love the mention about Continuous Integration workflows and new debugging features with service bus … and looking forward to getting my sticky hands and playing around some more.

Get them here: http://aka.ms/OfficeDevToolsForVS2012.

Great work @chakkaradeep!!

-CJ.