Following to my first post of Visual Studio Shell series I want to introduce Visual Studio Shell integrated mode in this post.

Visual Studio Shell integrated mode is a new name for what we knew as VSPackages for a long time. This new name hasn’t made that name obsolete but is just here to show that both integrated and isolated mode are built on top of the same foundation.

As I said in before, new version of Visual Studio Team Explorer has implemented as a VS Shell integrated application and when you’re installing Team Explorer, can notice this because installer lists shell integrated package as one of prerequisites that will be installed.

Even though integrated mode is just the other name of VSPackages but Microsoft has tried to put some new similarities between integrated mode and isolated mode so has added some new features to VSPackages for this goal.

For example, deployment of VSPackages has been made pretty easier with the release of Visual Studio 2008 and its SDK and Visual Studio generates a package definition file for you. This package definition file is actually a registry file that you had to build yourself for VSPackages prior to Visual Studio 2008.

VS Shell integrated is the top enhanced way to integrate something with Visual Studio because provides a set of low level APIs to work with IDE and this is much more than what you have when writing add-ins or macros.

In this series, my primary focus is on isolated mode because it’s a completely new thing and finding information about integrated mode wouldn’t be hard. But however, I will talk about integrated mode after finishing my posts about isolated as well.