The Visual Studio isolated shell allows you to create stand-alone applications that can run side-by-side with other versions of Visual Studio. It is used primarily to host specialized tools that can use Visual Studio services but also have a customized appearance and branding. Visual Studio features and menu command groups can be easily turned on and off. Application titles, application icons, and splash screens are fully customizable. For a list of customizable features, see Customizing the Isolated Shell.
To create an isolated shell application, start with a Visual Studio Shell Isolated project. This project, together with the Visual Studio SDK, contains everything that you need to develop and test your own isolated shell application. When you are ready to write the setup program that deploys your application, you must get the Visual Studio Shell (isolated mode) redistributable package.
For more information about the redistributable package, see the Visual Studio Extensibility Downloads Web site. For more information about how to deploy an isolated shell-based application, see Walkthrough: Creating a Basic Isolated Shell Application.
A Visual Studio isolated shell application has full access to Visual Studio services and supports special customization and branding. There are several ways you can customize an isolated shell application:
You can use VSPackages and Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) component parts to extend an isolated shell application just as you would use them in any other Visual Studio extension. For more information, see Extending the Isolated Shell.
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.
For more information about the different elements that you can customize, see Elements of the Isolated Shell.
The following features are standard to all editions of Visual Studio.
Feature Category
Feature
IDE Features
Import/Export Settings
Toolbox Control Installer
Task List & Error List
Output Window
Start Page
Properties Window
Toolbox
Solution Explorer
Bookmark Window
Class View
Object Browser
Command Window
Document Outline
Resource View
External Tool
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Add Service Reference
Language Integrated Query (LINQ) Support
Editor/Designer
Code browsing tools (unified find, source definition, inheritance)
IntelliSense
SmartTags
Code Snippets Manager
Code Snippets
Refactoring
Pretty listing
IntelliSense Filtering
Code Definition Window
Application Designer
Windows Forms Designer
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Designer
Debugging
C# Expression Evaluator
Local debugging
Managed debugging
Edit and Continue
Cross-thread debugging
Visualizations
DataTips
Native debugging
Script debugging
Interop debugging
Just-in-time (JIT) debugging
Multi-process debugging
XSLT debugging
Attach to local process
Trace Points
Breakpoint Constraints
Data
Server Explorer (Simplified - Data Only)
Data bind to local data (.MDF or .MDB)
Data bind to object
Data bind to Web service
Full set of data controls
XML editor
Data bind to local database server
Data Sources window
Web
HTML Editor
Web Browser
Web Forms Designer
Web Site Project
Web Application Project
Extensibility
Add-in Manager
Consumes VSPackages