“The Shell” (not a Hollywood production)

The announcement at TechEd 07 seems to have been received well by the blogsphere. For example Pablo is saying “WOW... finally extending Visual Studio will be much easier…”.

I’ve to admit, I don’t find this near that exciting, sorry.

We have had Visual Studio PPE edition before. And we already had an idea of what can be done with the “shell”; basically if you’ve installed Team Explorer in a box without Visual Studio on it you’ve already experience “the shell”.

So, Victor, what’s really new here? Thanks for asking!

In my opinion the most important thing to notice is that they have now removed the “expensive” part; it is nothing but great news to find out that you will be able to distribute royalty-free the “shell’ with your custom extension.

But the “obscure” it still there. There is nothing new regarding helping you writing these extensions in order for you to have something at all that you could ship royalty free at the end of the day.

So, how many people will actually take immediate advantage of this? Those who are *already* experienced enough to write their own extensions and couldn’t afford a non-royalty free license before. Take a pen and a very small piece of paper and that should be enough to write down all their names.

Overall, I’m happy as this is still a good move, but there is much more work to be done (which can be read too as: I’m not happy as I could be…)

I would really kill to see news in the direction of putting some light into the “obscure”.