NetForge for Visual Studio

Scaffold a production-shaped ASP.NET Core 10 + React 19 app in seconds — right inside Visual Studio.

NetForge is an opinionated, AI-ready, beautiful-out-of-the-box starter for line-of-business apps — built to be extended by AI or by you. Its vertical-slice architecture and clear conventions let an AI assistant add a whole feature from a single prompt, and keep the result readable enough for you to review at a glance. This extension creates one without leaving the IDE.

Create a project: Extensions ▸ NetForge

Extensions ▸ NetForge ▸ New NetForge Project… is how you start a NetForge project in Visual Studio. It opens a guided dialog — pick an edition, database, theme, and accent colour, then name it. NetForge scaffolds locally and opens the ready-to-run solution. Press F5 and the ASP.NET Core server builds and runs, starting the React client for you.

Features

• Extensions ▸ NetForge ▸ New NetForge Project… — the guided creation dialog. Scaffolds locally and opens the solution; F5 runs the whole stack (the ASP.NET Core server starts the React client).
• Pick your setup right in the dialog — edition, database (SQLite / PostgreSQL / SQL Server), theme, and brand accent colour.
• Community scaffolds locally with dotnet new — offline, instant, no sign-in. The extension detects your .NET SDK and installs the NetForge.Templates package the first time.
• A themed Pro showcase — see exactly what Pro unlocks (screenshots + the full feature grid) inside the IDE, via Extensions ▸ NetForge ▸ What's in Pro?
• Quick links to the configurator, live demo, and docs.

Tip: NetForge also appears in Visual Studio's Create a new project dialog, but Extensions ▸ NetForge is the recommended path — it always includes the React client and opens the solution ready to run.

Requirements

• Visual Studio 2022 (17.x) or 2026 (18.x).
• The .NET 10 SDK for Community scaffolding & running.

Community vs Pro

The Community edition is scaffolded locally and is free forever under the MIT license. Pro is generated from the configurator after signing in, and is unlocked by any GitHub Sponsors tier.

Getting started

1. Extensions ▸ NetForge ▸ New NetForge Project…
2. Choose Community, pick your database / theme / accent colour, name your app, and choose a folder.
3. Press F5 — the ASP.NET Core server builds and runs, starting the React client for you. Sign in with the seeded dev admin (credentials are in the project README.md).

Links

🌐 Configurator · ▶ Live demo · 📘 Docs · 💜 Sponsor & unlock Pro

Build from source

Requires Visual Studio with the Visual Studio extension development workload (the VSSDK build tooling); dotnet build alone won't produce a .vsix. From a Developer prompt:

msbuild NetForge.VsExtension.csproj /t:Restore;Build /p:Configuration=Release

The .vsix lands in bin\Release\net48\.

License

The extension is MIT-licensed. The Community template it scaffolds is MIT; the Pro edition is sponsor-licensed.