There are a load of extensions for VS2010 and VS2012 which should just work on VS2013. BUT, yes there is always a but, Microsoft does not want our life so easy. Each and every extension developer has to repack and republish his extensions every time a new VS version is released. Anyways, I was looking into a very exciting VS Extension known as Axiom3D. It is a rendering engine which is fully object oriented 3D graphics engine using C# and the .NET platform.

One can read more about that on the Axiom3D.net site. But basically, they have a nice Visual Studio Extension which unfortunately only works in VS 2012. Now if you want to install this on VS 2013, you cannot do it. So the easiest way to install it is to do it manually. Below is the procedure I used to install the VSIX manually.

Download the VSIX to your computer. Use 7-zip to unzip the VSIX file and take the templates folder and put it in <MSVC Install Folder>\Common7\IDE\ItemTemplates\CSharp\1033\AxiomSDK. This will put the templates in the proper folder. The next thing to do is to have nuget packages that comes the VSIX package. Take the packages and put them in a folder <MSVC Install Folder>\Common7\Packages\Axiom folder.

Now open VS 2013, open the Package Manager Settings, Click on package sources and add the axiom package folder path. That’s pretty much it. Now you can close VS 2013 and restart it. Make a new project and use the new templates.

Axiom3D is a nice rendering engine and is very much better then using direct OpenGL wrappers like OpenTK with a lot of useful documentation. Hope it helps and somebody working Axiom3D will create a new Visual Studio Extension VSIX file for VS 2013.