This whitepaper is for historical reference only. Some content might be outdated and some links might not be available. # AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio is a plugin for Visual Studio that makes it easier to develop, debug, and deploy .NET applications that use AWS. The toolkit is available from the Visual Studio Marketplace and supports Visual Studio 2017 and 2019. You can use NuGet to include the AWS SDK for .NET in your projects, 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](https://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/). The toolkit allows you to create, configure, edit, or query resources in your AWS account, directly from within Visual Studio and without having to visit [AWS Management Console](https://aws.amazon.com/console/) or use any other secondary tool. The toolkit contains a rich set of features that help configure and deploy new solutions, and can be broken down into a number of core features, most of which are available from the **AWS Explorer** in Visual Studio’s **View** menu. For example, you can use Visual Studio to build a CloudFormation template (Infrastructure as Code) with the convenience of IntelliSense and deploy to AWS with AWS CloudFormation. The AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio also includes project templates for Lambda functions, CloudFormation templates and sample projects showing how to use various AWS Services. It also makes it easy to deploy your applications into AWS runtime platforms, such as Elastic Beanstalk, Lambda and API Gateway, and ECS containers.