News

AWS Visual Studio Toolkit Updated for VS 2019 Launch

• By David Ramel
• 04/01/2019

The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio has been updated to support most of the new features coming in Visual Studio 2019, the latest edition of the popular Microsoft IDE that will be released tomorrow.

With more than 165,384 installations, the Visual Studio Marketplace extension helps Microsoft coders develop, debug and deploy .NET applications using Amazon Web Services.

Among its features are project templates that can serve as starting points for AWS console and Web apps, an AWS Explorer to view the AWS resources used and more.

They help developers deploy ASP.NET and ASP.NET Core Web applications to AWS Elastic Beanstalk, deploy containers to Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) or deploy .NET Core serverless applications with AWS Lambda and AWS CloudFormation, AWS said in an announcement post last week.

Notable new features provided in the update include support for Lambda Custom .NET Core runtime, which lets developers use any version of .NET Core in Lambda, such as .NET Core 2.2 or .NET Core 3.0 preview, has been added to the toolkit.

Continuing in the serverless computing vein, a Lambda layers feature was added to Amazon.Lambda.Tools .NET Core Global Tool. "This makes it easy to create a layer of your .NET assemblies and tell Lambda to deploy your project with a specified layer," AWS said. "That way the deployment bundle can have a reduced size. And if you choose to create the layer on an Amazon Linux environment, you can optimize the .NET assemblies added to the layer by having them pre-jitted. This can reduce your cold-start time."

One Visual Studio 2019 feature that doesn't yet have full support in the toolkit is the new project wizard, redesigned to improve the project-creation experience. However, AWS said functionality provided in that redesign isn't yet available to the its toolkit, or to similar Visual Studio extensions.

"For example, the Language, Platform, or Project type filters ... in the new project wizard are not accessible to custom project templates like the ones that AWS provides," AWS said. "If you select C# in the language filter, our C# project templates will not show up.

"The Visual Studio team plans to address this issue for extensions in a future update to Visual Studio 2019, but the changes will not be in the initial GA version. Until this is addressed, the best way to find our AWS project templates is to use the search bar and either search for 'AWS' or 'Lambda'."

The toolkit's associated GitHub project is named "AWS SDK for .NET."

The VS Marketplace listing shows nearly 1.2 million downloads and more than 165,000 installations, earning an average 3.1 rating (scale to 5) from 39 developers who reviewed it.