The SharePoint Patterns and Practices group released today a Visual Studio extension for the SharePoint Framework.
The Visual Studio Extension for SharePoint Framework wraps the command-line UI of the Microsoft Yeoman Generator (yo @microsoft/sharepoint) into a familiar Windows Forms experience, executes the generator project scaffolding behind the scenes and creates a Visual Studio project that includes all the necessary files for a complete web part project. Developers can launch the Workbench local sandbox environment to test their web parts by pressing F5 or by binding to the Gulp Serve event in the Task Runner Explorer.
I am excited to be a part of this project. Thanks to Eric Shupps and Vesa Juvonen for including me! Eric has a post with more details.
You can download the extension from the Visual Studio marketplace.
And, like all PnP projects, the source code is on GitHub: https://github.com/sharepoint/sp-dev-fx-extension