You can provide a redistributable version of the Visual Studio integrated shell if Visual Studio is not already installed.
The integrated shell is intended primarily for hosting programming languages and software development tools.Ĭustom tools that are built on the integrated shell automatically merge with any other edition of Visual Studio that is installed on the same computer. “Integrated mode enables your users to use standard Visual Studio features along with your custom tools. Following are the definitions for both the modes. Visual Studio Shell has two modes, Integrated and Isolated.
The source code for the prior application having a vsix extension could be downloaded along with this article or from Github. The prerequisite for this article is a running application that was created in part one or second of this series.
The series will be divided into three articles as mentioned below, and we’ll focus more on practical implementations and hands-on rather than going much into theory. Let me again review the roadmap of this series of Visual Studio Extensibility. Visual Studio can be completely customized from its launch screen to the advanced functionalities which it provides. In this article, I’ll explain how one can customize the basic Visual Studio Isolated shell application and add a custom extension to the shell application. Therefore one can get their custom Visual Studio as a product which could be sold in the market. Visual Studio provides the flexibility to create our own IDE or a Visual Studio kind of product altogether having custom extensions or some pre-defined functionalities of visual studio.
This article will illustrate how to add or embed the visual studio extension or visual studio package into a Visual Studio Isolated Shell application. The first part focused on creating a Visual Studio Extension to locate a file or folder in Windows Explorer, the second part was more about deploying the Visual Studio extension to staging server via continuous integration. With this utility bundled inside the installation pack, Visual Studio is no longer a prerequisite for your applications.This article is in continuation of “ Creating your first visual studio VSIX package” article of the series Visual Studio Extensibility. Regardless of your project type, the Visual Studio Shell Redistributable package must be included within the setup program that can successfully deploy your application on the final user's computer. NET Framework 4.5 and relies on the Visual Studio IDE in order to ease the development process. The isolated version of Visual Studio Shell Redistributable also includes the. On the other hand, the isolated shell allows the deployment of standalone applications that only make use of Visual Studio's services, with various customization possibilities both in appearance and functionality. Visual Studio Shell (Isolated) Redistributable Package
This mode is compatible with Visual Studio Professional and above.
Projects created with the integrated shell can integrate with a full version of Visual Studio upon deployment and do not include other components (such as programming languages) aside from the IDE, the debugging tools and the source control integration.Īs such, you can use it to implement your own programming languages or tools into Visual Studio. Visual Studio Shell (Integrated) Redistributable Package
The difference between the two stands in the possibility to create custom tools that will work alongside Visual Studio and remove features that you don't want to include in your application. The package comes in two different versions, one dedicated to the integrated mode and the other to the isolated mode, depending on the developer's choice. The redistributable package is compatible with any version of Visual Studio, as Microsoft is offering installation files for Visual Studio 2008, 2010, 20. It contains the required runtime binaries and other components that are mandatory in the distribution process. The Visual Studio Shell Redistributable package is intended to allow developers to deploy their applications based on the Visual Studio Shell.