At its Build developer conference today, Microsoft announced that it has added support for Bootstrap, the popular framework for responsive websites that was launched out of Twitter in 2011. Visual Studio 2013’s project templates will use Bootstrap by default when you want to build a web app in Microsoft’s ASP.NET now. If you were already tired of seeing too many Bootstrap-based sites, chances are you will now encounter even more of them.
For Microsoft, it makes sense to add Bootstrap to its developer tools for web apps. It is the most popular framework for building responsive sites and has the most active ecosystem of services around it. In his demo at Build, for example, Microsoft’ Scott Hanselman also showed how developers can use Bootswatch to find Bootstrap themes to make their sites stand out a bit more. This isn’t directly integrated into Visual Studio, but it obviously just takes replacing a CSS file to change a Bootstrap theme.
Developers could, of course, always use a Bootstrap competitor like ZURB’s Foundation for their apps, too, but the default for ASP.NET web apps is not Bootstrap.
The preview of Visual Studio 2013 is now available for download.