Visual Studio Shell (Isolated) Redistributable Package
The Visual Studio Shell (Isolated) provides a foundation on which you can build your own custom-branded tools environment that runs side-by-side with Visual Studio. Building on the Visual Studio Shell (Isolated) lets you reuse the Visual Studio IDE in your application so that you can accelerate development of your tools environment by focusing just on your core tooling problem.
This download contains redistributable runtime binaries that you can distribute together with your Visual Studio Shell (Isolated)-based application.
Visual Studio Shell (Integrated) Redistributable Package
The Visual Studio Shell (integrated mode) provides the foundation on which you can seamlessly integrate tools and programming languages within Visual Studio. The Visual Studio Shell (integrated mode) does not contain any programming language, so it provides the perfect foundation to deploy a development environment for your own language.
The Visual Studio Shell (integrated mode) seamlessly integrates with Visual Studio Professional and above. Any tools and programming languages that run inside the Visual Studio Shell (integrated mode) will run together with Visual Studio if they are also installed on the same machine. By using the Visual Studio Shell (integrated mode), you will not need to make Visual Studio a pre-requisite on your user machines.
This download contains the redistributable runtime binaries that you can distribute with your Visual Studio tools and programming languages. For development and testing of your Visual Studio tools and programming languages, please download the Visual Studio SDK.