What is the Visual Studio shell (standalone shell) for?

Question

Is this some kind of ready-made graphical interface? Why do I want this instead of the WinForms user interface, which is quickly configured?
What gives me that I have to spend time composing? Am I getting windows and docking like in Visual Studio 2008? Is there any monetary value to use it?
What does the deployment look like - is my application a standalone EXE, or is it being sent as a single package or archive that runs inside the shell?
Is Eclipse RCP good comparable, and if so, how are they compared?

Answer 1

Visual Studio Shell allows developers to quickly create and distribute their own tools, creating a simplified Visual Studio development environment.

A standalone Visual Studio shell-based application has full access to Visual Studio services and supports customization and branding. There are several ways to configure a shell-based application:

• You can use add-ins and VSPackages to extend a shell-based isolated application, just as you could use them to extend Visual Studio itself.
• To make Visual Studio and the command groups available or inaccessible, update the .vsct file in the application user interface (UI) project.
• To remove parameter pages or other Visual Studio shell components from the application, update the application's .pkgundef file.
• To change other aspects of the appearance or behavior of the shell, update the application's .pkgdef file.
• Some aspects of the shell may also be specified when starting the application. To do this, update the parameters in the call to the entry entry point appenvstub.dll.

Visual Studio Shell is freely available as part of the Visual Studio SDK . Visual Studio Shell is free for building and deploying applications.

Your isolated shell application can be installed on any computer with the Visual Studio 2008 Shell Redistributable Package (isolated mode) .

Each sandboxed shell application that needs to be deployed must have a valid shell boot key (SLK). SLK is uniquely associated with the application and cannot be used to download any other application. You can get the SLK from the Visual Studio Extension Development Center website.

After you receive the shell boot key (SLK), you must add it to your Shell project. Follow this procedure to add SLK to a project that was created using the isolated Visual Studio shell template.

Note. Everything said so far has been copied and pasted from different pages of Microsoft's documentation. A good place to start is the Walkthrough. The main isolated shell application .

Answer 2

I would like to mention that SQL Server Management Studio 2012 requires both of these entries to be in the Add or Remove Programs section:

• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Isolated) - ENU
• Visual Studio 2010 Prerequisites - English

I know this because I deleted them, broke SSMS and had to recover from the installation media, after which these 2 elements reappeared.

Answer 3

I used the integrated shell to try IronPython at home, without having to install the full trial version of VisualStudio. This is a good IDE if you are used to it.

There seems to be a big difference between an integrated shell and an isolated one.

An integrated shell is an IDE without a programming language installed. If you don't have VisualStudio, but want to use a free plugin like Python Tools for Visual Studio, then you can use the built-in shell.

The isolated shell is well described in Powerlord's answer, it seems to be intended for software developers because it allows branding and modification of the user interface.

Answer 4

It seems that if you use a standalone shell, you can create your product so that it can connect to Visual Studio. You can then distribute your product as standalone with VS) or as an add-on to Visual Studio. (just a hunch)

Answer 5

I realized that I was late for a party on this issue, but on the day that Sybase released PowerBuilder versions 12 and 12.5, they included the .NET version of each product. It was a PowerBuilder running in a Visual Studio isolated shell. Honestly, if you ask me, they have done an outstanding job on this. The only drawback was that it was initially focused on creating WPF goals, assemblies, etc. But you could not do WinForm development (in PowerBuilder.NET). You should have deployed this through the PowerBuilder Classic interface.

I recently started learning Python and remembered that one of the groups also developed a Python deployment using an isolated shell. But I can not find anything extra on this.

Of course, I understand that Python can now be written in Visual Studio, but I was just trying to delve into the story. Last night, when I was digging, I noticed that an isolated shell was available until 2015.

Does anyone know if this has been stopped?