Visual Studio as a Platform

Visual Studio is a platform for third parties and can be used in two ways: through the Visual Studio 2008 Shell tool, vendors can use the Visual Studio IDE as the core of their own tools, and through Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA) ISVs can make their own applications customizable through tools based on Visual Studio.

Visual Studio Shell

The Visual Studio Shell is available free of charge as part of the Visual Studio SDK. It allows tools vendors to focus on building unique features instead of on implementing common IDE features, such as a text editor and project system, although it does not include any of the compilers or other programming language tools. Partners can use the Visual Studio Shell in either integrated mode or isolated mode.

Integrated mode automatically merges the custom tool with any other installations of Visual Studio 2008 running on the same machine or it can run standalone if no other copy of Visual Studio 2008 is installed. For example, vendors of programming languages can use integrated mode to add their languages alongside Microsoft’s, allowing developers to use the partner’s language with Visual Studio tools. Integrated mode was the only mode supported by Visual Studio 2005.