Web Essentials works on VS 2012 and has LESS support (unless it was removed recently as Mads has removed features for the 2013 version as they are integrated in VS now). This is the best option by far IMHO.
Doing on the fly LESS with something like DotLess works, but DotLess is kind of buggy and it adds a bit of overhead to your server as LESS files are processed and cached in ASP.NET instead of in core IIS.
Prior to Web Essentials there also used to be a few third party libraries that provided LESS support for Visual Studio - you can look for those as well. Failing that there are also lots of command line tools that will do this - the entire JavaScript build eco-system is there. Grunt and support librarires allow doing this as well and it's fairly easy to hook this in with
There's also a bunch of useful info here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2986204/less-css-on-windows+++ Rick ---
>I have VS 2012 installed on this laptop and only have about 9GB of free space on the C: drive. So I am limited to what I can add to this laptop (like VS 2013 with Web Essentials which would be nice). While I do development on VS 2012 the DOTLESS converts the LESS file to CSS, dynamically. Now I am starting to test this project on a DiscountAsp.net site (I purchased just for testing). Since I don't know how to make the public site "understand" the LESS type file, I would like to convert the LESS file into the .CSS and then copy the .CSS to the public site.
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>What stand-alone tool you recommend to convert LESS to CSS?
