Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/ihaynes/archive/2014/08/12/web-essentials-extension-now-available-for-visual-studio-express.aspx

Visual Studio Express has always had one big issue for me, the inability to install any (or very few) of the normal Visual Studio extensions.

One of the best extensions for front-end development and design is the Web Essentials extension by Mads Kristensen on the VS team. It was a hugely welcome surprise to find that this extension is now available, in full, for VS Express, and had been since May, darn it!

It has a huge number of useful features, not least being able to minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, which is almost a prerequisite for responsive sites. It can also bundle them together.

There are lots of other features for HTML editing; intellisense and syntax highlighting for robots.txt files; 'surround with tag', intellisense for meta tags (including iOS, Twitter and Facebook); generate vendor-specific CSS etc etc. The full details can be found at the dedicated site. http://vswebessentials.com

This extension alone makes VS Express far more useful and worth having.