A little while back, Sayed Hashimi and I built the Web Developer Checklist Chrome extension as a companion for the website webdevchecklist.com. We built the extension in Visual Studio and quickly realized that we could optimize the development experience substantially by tweaking the build process along with other details.

From that experience, we now have a project template that contains all you need for writing a Chrome extension and it is available for download.

The project template gives you the following features:

• JavaScript Intellisense for the Google Chrome object model
• Folder structure suited for production ready Google Chrome extensions
• MSBuild integration to produce .zip files to upload to the Google Web Store

It’s all explained in this short demo video.

As always, this project template is open source on GitHub.

Download the Visual Studio project template

Here’s a Channel9 video where Sayed explains how he modified the build system for this template if you’re interested. It starts around 13 minutes in.

In this video from //build/ I show what’s new for web developers in Visual Studio 2013. Here are some of the highlights:

• URL rewrite Intellisense in web.config
• JavaScript navigational dropdowns
• EcmaScript 6 support
• A few CSS/LESS trics
• New HTML editor
• Browser Link (project “Artery”)
• Open sourcing Web Essentials

Enjoy!