Today Microsoft released an updated version of the Visual Studio extensions for SharePoint, version 1.3. The extensions provide a number of templates to help SharePoint developers create various SharePoint artifacts such as Web Parts, Content Types, Event Receivers and a number of others.
A number of features have been added since the last release. The biggest one in my opinion is x64 support. This was a huge gap in the previous version of the extensions, but now you can develop on an x64 OS. Many other improvements have been made as well and I encourage you to go take a look by clicking here.
The extensions on their own are a great help to those wanting to quickly get started with SharePoint development. Keep in mind that they are just one tool of many that will help you get your SharePoint development projects off the ground. Please provide feedback should you encounter any bugs. Microsoft takes the feedback seriously and will use it to help improve future releases of their development tools, especially the one geared towards SharePoint developers.