Building VS Shell with VS 2008 SDK July CTP

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Since we shipped the VS SDK July CTP a couple of days ago, we have discovered a couple of issues that makes building your own VS Shell not as easy as we had hoped. I wanted to document all these issues and the workarounds here to unblock anyone who is trying to build a Shell.

Issues

1. VS Shell template location is not intuitive

The VS Shell template location is supposed to be under the Extensibility node. However, due to a last minute bug, we had to move the template to under "Visual C++" as a workaround to another bug.

2. Microsoft.VSSDK.AppEnvWizardExtension.dll and DependencyChecker.exe is not strongname signed

These two binaries were not strongname signed properly, so they will fail strongname verification.

The workaround is to shutdown VS and manually disable strongname verification on these two binaries. Run the following commands in the VS 2008 command prompt. You will need to make sure that the command prompt is admin-elevated if you are on Vista:

sn -Vr "\Program Files\Microsoft
Visual Studio 9.0\common7\ide\PublicAssemblies\Microsoft.VSSDK.AppEnvWizardExte
nsion.dll"

and

sn -Vr "\Program Files\Microsoft
Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\ide\DependencyChecker.exe"

 

3. Package created with VS Shell does not build properly

The solution created by the VS Shell Wizard contains a VS package project. This package doesn't do anything besides contributing a sample Help>About dialog. This package will not be in the VS Shell solutions in future releases, and is currently producing some build errors. The simpliest way to fix this is to right-click on the project and remove it from the solution. You can add your own package that you want to run in the Shell later.

If you are running Vista, I would suggest that you run Visual Studio 2008 with elevated privileges to minimize the number of issues you run into. This is obviously not the recommended way to run long term, because we will ensure Run As Normal User (RANU) work flawlessly before we ship a final version, but for now, it's the best way to do it on Vista.

 

So those should be all the workarounds needed to unblock you for now. Over the next couple of days, I will post about how you add your own package to the VS Shell. It is a little bit different than adding packages to Visual Studio and all the tooling is not in the SDK yet. So there will be some manual steps involved. Stay tuned!