Visual Studio Shell architecture – Part 1

posted by  kevyn (54)  13 months ago (blogs.msdn.com)

Before getting into how this new Visual Studio Shell Isolated (let’s call it VSSI for short) thing works, I thought I would go into some background of how Visual Studio works, so you can better understand how your program will work.

When you click on the icon in the start menu to start Visual Studio, you run a program called devenv.exe. Devenv is a short version of development environment or developer environment depending who you talk to. This exe (we call it the stub) will then load a DLL named msenv.dll – and that is where the majority of the work is done. When you launch any