Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Shell (isolated mode) Redistributable Package you should install the shell (step 2): Part 2: Install the shell After you install the redistributable package, you must install the shell. Complete the following steps to install the shell. On the computer's hard drive, locate the VS 2008 Shell Redist Isolated Mode folder.
Visual Studio Shell enables developers to rapidly create and distribute their own custom tools by building on a streamlined Visual Studio IDE. A Visual Studio isolated shell-based application has full access to Visual Studio services and supports and branding. There are several ways you can customize a shell-based application, as follows:.
You can use add-ins and VSPackages to extend an isolated shell-based application just as you would use them to extend Visual Studio itself. To make Visual Studio features and menu command groups available or unavailable, update the.vsct file in the user interface (UI) project of the application.
To remove Options pages or other Visual Studio shell components from the application, update the.pkgundef file of the application. To modify other aspects of the appearance or behavior of the shell, update the.pkgdef file of the application. Some aspects of the shell can also be specified when the application is started. To do this, update the parameters in the call to the Start entry point of the appenvstub.dll. The Visual Studio Shell is freely available as part of the. Visual Studio Shell is royalty-free for building and deploying applications. Your isolated shell application can be installed on any computer that has the.
Each isolated Shell-based application to be deployed must have a valid shell load key (SLK). The SLK is uniquely related to the application and cannot be used to load any other application. You can obtain SLKs on the Web site. After you obtain a shell load key (SLK), you must add it to your Shell project. Follow to add an SLK to a project that was created by using the Visual Studio Shell Isolated template.
Note: Everything said up to this point has been copied and pasted from various Microsoft documentation pages. A good place to start might be.
I used the integrated shell to try IronPython at home, without having to install the full VisualStudio trial version. It's a nice IDE if you're used to it.
It seems there is a big difference between the integrated shell and the isolated one. The integrated shell is an IDE without any programming language installed. If you don't have VisualStudio but want to use a free plugin such as Python Tools for Visual Studio, then you can use the integrated shell. The isolated shell is well described in Powerlord's answer, it seems to be made for programming software developpers, since it allows branding and modifications of the user interface.
We're having a lot of trouble finding authoritative licensing information with regard to the Visual Studio 2008 Shell (isolated mode) Redistributable Package. Specifically, we'd like to know if we have to display the license/EULA agreement during install if we're launching the redist installer from our bootstrapper. And do we (where and how) need to include the VS Shell EULA with our product licensing. Thanks in advance. I'm sure this information is available - we're just having trouble finding it.
Follow up: I now realize that the vsAppEnvRedist.exe download is not the redistributable, but is actually a package that includes the redist and the licensing terms. That's not made very clear on the. I read the contents of 'VS 2008 Shell Redistribution License.enu.txt' which comes in the package.
After reading it (a few times) it sounds like we don't have to include the Microsoft EULA at all, so long as our EULA covers everything. It'll probably have to go to the lawyers to determine whether everything is covered, but at least I know we don't have to have multiple licenses floating around during our install. Would be nice if that licensing information was available somewhere without having to actually run an executable after a nearly 400MB download!