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Indroducing Visual Studio Shell

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I have not been making too many posts here, mostly because I have had my head down working on some new, secret tools for the past few months. Now I can talk about them because today at TechEd we announced what that new tool is, Visual Studio Shell Isolated. That is one of those fancy, descriptive names that Microsoft marketing gives to something that is quite simple, but at the same time powerful. Over the years many people have been creating packages and Add-ins for Visual Studio, but if anybody wanted to use your package, they had to have a copy of Visual Studio (pro or above) installed on their computer or you had to license what we called the PPE (or “Premier Partner Edition” – another beautiful name) and it was not exactly cheap.

What I have been working on is allowing you to, by building a small exe program and editing an even smaller text file that looks like a .reg file, create your own application which consumes the Visual Studio shell. Your program is branded with your company name and logos in any way that you wish, the only place that any Microsoft logo appears is on the splash screen where on the bottom right we put the text “Powered By Visual Studio”. And best of all – it is free!!! You can also distribute the PPE version of Visual Studio Shell, for free!!!

Over the next few posts I will be making a series of postings about how to get started, the tools available, how to distribute your applications, architecture, which version is best for you, etc.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2007
    This remotely sounds like Eclipse RCP, is that the idea?

  • Anonymous
    June 05, 2007
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    Will Microsoft sue me for using it like the TestDriven.NET guys?

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    John X: I am a developer that likes to write code and not a lawyer, so I will not comment or try to promote an agenda surrounding the details of this other than to say that most software (including Microsoft software, open source software, and yes, even TestDriven.NET) has some sort of license, and you need to follow that license if you wish to use it.

  • Anonymous
    June 06, 2007
    Valdimir: I am not well versed in Eclipse terminology, so I could not make direct comparisons in the functionality of each.