   World gets Visual Studio Shell 2008 for gratis
  Promit's thread reminded me of this.Yeah, the 2008 version of Microsoft's Visual Studio Shell is being released absolutely free, no licensing strings or anything. The "Shell" is the part that's left after you take out all the language-specific bits. You can just write those back in, though, for whatever you wish. That is, one may take it, write the wire-up code for their new language (I imagine Ruby/Python will be done quite quickly, but any two-bit language created by an individual will suffice), and create an specific environment for it. Handy! I hear it can do more than just languages, but I'm less informed about that. My source is PCAuthority (Australian) October edition.Seems awfully generous. I have no idea if people could write implementations for languages that Microsoft already supports (see above), but from what I've read, that appears kosher. I guess they're comfortable that their implementations are good enough to survive?   
  That is extremely interesting. Now if only writing that sort of thing for VS wasn't such a horribly painful experience.   ;  The team developing VS Shell has an MSDN blog. There's also a web site.   ;Quote:Original post by PromitThat is extremely interesting. Now if only writing that sort of thing for VS wasn't such a horribly painful experience.I've never tried it, but I've heard stories. I'm wondering what kind of advantage this has if it's painful to extend. After all, Eclipse is already here, is cross-platform, and also painful to extend (as far as I've heard--haven't developed for it either).Is VS somehow better in that regard?   ;  I've never actually tried adding new language support to Visual Studio. I have, however, downloaded the VSIP toolkit for 2005, looked at the documentation and sat there with no idea where the heck to start, and moved on with my life without writing a single line of code. I've done the equivalent actions with Eclipse as well.Keeping in mind that not a single line of code was written for either environment, it seemed to me that the VSIP interface was slightly less painful to deal with than the Eclipse interface. YMMV.   ;  I'm interested in seeing the business strategy for giving away a free development platform. It doesn't make sense to spend millions developing software and then to just give it away...So there's gotta be a return on investment somewhere down the line to make it worth spending the money to release this for free.My guess: the larger strategy may be to saturate the developer market with microsoft development tools so that developers create microsoft friendly software, which then creates a bigger development community in the microsoft software arena (instead of open source), which in the long term, brings in more paying microsoft customers. I don't want to speculate too much...I'll be interested in seeing more about VS2k8   ;Quote:Original post by slayeminI'm interested in seeing the business strategy for giving away a free development platform. It doesn't make sense to spend millions developing software and then to just give it away...So there's gotta be a return on investment somewhere down the line to make it worth spending the money to release this for free.They're not giving it all away for free - all the language-specific packs, they can still charge for.To some extent I think they want to get lots of languages into the IDE so that people become familiar with it and then choose to use it when pursuing further languages. I also suspect that anyone integrating with the VS Shell will get APIs to hook into unit testing, source control, etc etc etc - which makes Team Foundation Server a more attractive proposition.   ;  MS are also opening up their compilers for easy extension, see Phoenix.   ;Quote:Original post by slayeminI'm interested in seeing the business strategy for giving away a free development platform. It doesn't make sense to spend millions developing software and then to just give it away...So there's gotta be a return on investment somewhere down the line to make it worth spending the money to release this for free.Well Microsoft's primary revenue streams are the Windows (mobile,client,server) and Office platforms and products. Pretty much everything else they produce is to add value and drive sales for those two products.Free developer tools is a no-brainer really. If Microsoft make us developers grin excitedly at the cool new XYZ widgets in the new free tool then we're going to run off and play with it. For the most part that's one more developer working on Microsoft technologies and if you publish your product (for free or otherwise) then anyone who uses it will almost certainly need a Windows or Office product. That's your RoI [grin]The flipside is that free X-Platform tools like Eclipse for Java and so on are quite a threat to the MS strategy. Not only are people tempted by the nice free shiny toys but they've got easy avenues to take whatever they produce to other platforms, which is less potential sales of Windows licenses (etc..)Jack