Microsoft, the Visual Studio Shells and the old versions

Visual Studio 2008 started to offer a new form of extensibility: a whole IDE for your app! That is, reusing the core of the Visual Studio IDE for your own tool instead of reinventing the wheel creating a new IDE from scratch. This is named Visual Studio Shell and there are two flavors: the “Isolated Shell“, where your app has its own instance of Visual Studio Shell even if the Visual Studio IDE is already installed (because the user is a developer); and the “Integrated Shell“, where if the Visual Studio IDE is already installed, your Visual Studio Shell integrates with it (otherwise is installed anyway).

I have never worked with the Visual Studio Shell, nor I have any knowledge, but I provide a page on this site for the download links. Alas, it seems that Microsoft doesn’t pay much attention to keep the links working, so I get questions on forums and by email about their availability. If the links of that page fail, you can try the following:

It would be nice if Microsoft provided a centralized, public page with the downloads that VSX developers may require to develop and test extensions (Visual Studio SDKs, .NET Framework SDKs, Visual Studio Shells, Community editions, etc.) and, very important, from the current Visual Studio version going back to… Visual Studio 2005 and .NET Framework 2.0. Not everyone wants or can use the latest bits. I keep a couple of hard disks at home and at my basement with all the required Visual Studio versions, Visual Studio SDKs, Windows SDKs, .NET Framework SDKs, Windows OS versions,  etc. fearing that they would disappear from the web some day (which certainly is happening with the shells). And now that Microsoft uses web-based installers for Visual Studio with no .iso file provided, I am even afraid that my Visual Studio 2017 installer won’t work in a few years, so I have to create an offline installer.

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