For a long time I was under the impression that you had to have a valid Visual Studio license if you wanted to use Visual Studio Authoring Extensions for SCOM and/or SCSM. Why, simply because Microsoft’s download page says so: “The System Center 2012 Visual Studio Authoring Extensions—VSAE—is an add-in for Visual Studio 2012/2013 Professional and Ultimate which provides Lifecycle Management Tools to support Management Pack Authoring.” – http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30169. Well, with this post I want to prove that page wrong, and show you how to get it working without an expensive license.

First things first; lets get the installation files from Microsoft Download Center:

Visual Studio 2013 Shell (Isolated): http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40764

Visual Studio 2013 Shell (Integrated): http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=40777

System Center 2012 Visual Studio Authoring Extensions: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30169

When we have taken care of that go on and install them in the order I listed above.

Now that we have it installed there is one last thing: Visual Studio 2013 Update 2. It can be obtained with Microsoft Update or go to http://www.visualstudio.com/downloads/download-visual-studio-vs and scroll down until you reach “Visual Studio Updates”, click the link that says “Install now” then run it to start the update process.

Fire up Visual Studio 2013 Shell and check it out!



I will be writing more about VSAE (powered by the Visual Studio 2013 Shell of course) in the near future, so stay tuned!

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