It’s always nice to be using the latest and greatest of things, however not everyone really enjoys “change” (especially with regard to their development environments).

So this quick article will cover how to go about creating and using ASP.NET MVC 5 applications within Visual Studio 2012 for those out there that want to keep up with the newest version of their favorite development technology but may not have the courage (or the cash) to upgrade to Visual Studio 2013.

Web application

In November of this year, the .NET team released the ASP.NET and Web Tools 2013.1 Update for Visual Studio 2012. I wish I could say the steps necessary to integrate MVC 5 into Visual Studio 2012 were more complicated than simply downloading this, but they aren’t.

You can download the update itself from the link provided below:

You’ll find that after installing the update and restarting Visual Studio 2012 that you’ll be able to create a new ASP.NET MVC 5 application through Visual Studio 2012:

Empty project

After installing the update, you’ll see that MVC 5 is now available in Visual Studio 2012.

Great! What else?

The update not only provides the necessary foundation for creating MVC 5 applications, but it features the following additional improvements as well:

So if you are a bit hesitant to give Visual Studio 2013 a try, but you want to play around with some of the newer features and development templates that it provides, I would recommend downloading and checking out this update.