VS Shell Customization Points

Following up on my last post about VS Shell workarounds with the current VS SDK, I wanted to make a post about the customizations that you can do with the VS Shell. Most of these are done through the <projectname>.pkdef file that gets generated when you create a new VS Shell project.

The primary customization points of the Visual Studio Shell (isolated mode) are:

·         Splash Screen

·         Application Title

·         Application Icon

·         Menus and Commands

·         (Unregister packages)

·         Command Line Logo

·         Allow Add-ins

·         Default Project Location

·         Default Search Page

·         Default Web Browser Homepage

·         New Project Dialog Installed Templates Header

·         Default Debug Engine

·         Disable Output Window

·         Allow Dropped Files on Main Window

·         Solution file extension

·         User option file extension

Try opening up your project' .pkgdef file and it should be pretty intuitive how you customize these.

 thanks,
James