Following to my Visual Studio Shell series, in this post I want to introduce you to Visual Studio Shell isolated mode. Probably you’ve read my previous posts in this series that introduce Visual Studio Shell and Visual Studio Shell integrated mode.

Visual Studio Shell isolated mode is a completely new technology in Visual Studio 2008. Isolated mode is a great way to build your own IDE based on Visual Studio IDE elements. While you could use integrated mode to integrate your own extensions with Visual Studio IDE, isolated mode lets you to build your own IDEs similar to Visual Studio.

You know that Visual Studio has a great implementation of many common and professional user interface elements for building IDEs especially for programming and software related goals.

Suppose that you want to build a an IDE to work with your own programming language, say Keyvan++. You have several options but most of them lead to build most of the IDE with your own code but thank to new isolated mode you can do this easily just by applying Visual Studio user interface elements for your own IDE and write least code.

You can build isolated mode applications with Visual C++ language and isolated packages are available in Visual Studio project templates after installing Visual Studio 2008 SDK.

The important point about isolated IDEs is the fact that you don’t need to install Visual Studio as a prerequisite to run them. You just need to install a free isolated IDE package and .NET Framework 3.5 to be able to run such IDEs. Moreover, these prerequisites can be embedded in your setup installers to save end users from manual installation.

In prior versions of Visual Studio there was a Premier Partner Edition program for Visual Studio that let you to build such isolated IDEs in a more difficult way by installing some core APIs of Visual Studio. SQL Server 2005 Management Studio is a good and well-known example of this program. But Premier Partner Edition was tied to the installation of Visual Studio so Microsoft decided to provide a better way to accomplish this goal in Visual Studio 2008.

You probably know that different versions of Visual Studio have their own stub that is like a unique application ID for them. So Standard edition has its own stub while Team Suite has a different stub and these two editions can run independently on same machine. Isolated mode runs IDEs with their own stub which makes them independent from Visual Studio editions and they can run easily.

I’ll talk more about the isolated mode in the future but for now I can refer you to some open source projects that have built isolated IDEs for different purposes:

• IronPython Studio is an isolated IDE built by Clarius Consulting on top of the isolated mode of Visual Studio Shell and IronPython example included in Visual Studio SDK.
• Storyboard Designer is another open source IDE built on top of Visual Studio Shell isolated and DSL tools that lets you design storyboard diagrams.
• AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft is the last example that I list here and is an IDE to build add-ins for World of Warcraft game.

Keep an eye on this post series. I’ll step in more technical details about Visual Studio Shell isolated mode in future posts.