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Source Control in Visual Studio Isolated Shell

I am developing an Isolated Shell that caters to "designers/special content creators" performing specific tasks, using the Shell. As they operate on files, they need to be able to use TFS for source control. This is mainly due to the fact that Developers will also operate on the same files from TFS but using Visual studio 2008.

After looking and searching I still could not find Team Explorer to be available to Shell. Asking on MSDN forums, lead me to the answer that "this is not supported yet in the Isolated Shell". Well, then the whole point of giving away a shell is not justified, if you want to use a source control system for your files. The idea is not to recreate everything and develop tool windows etc using the TFS provider API.

The Visual Studio Extensibility book by Keyven Nayyeri has an example, which only goes so far into this problem of adding a sc provider.

Has anyone worked on developing Visual Studio 2008 Isolated Shell applications/environment? Please provide comments, questions - anything that you have to share apart from the following threads, which I've already participated in.

Threads from MSDN forums:

Thanks for your answer. Yes you are right, we will acquire CALs for users without having to buy them Visual Studio, that's the direction we will be taking.

But I am yet to figure out how to make Team Explorer available to such users, inside Shell. So I am looking to find out the technical details of how that can be done.

I mean, I have a user, he installs my VS Shell application, he has no VStudio Team system on his machine. Now if I acquire CAL for TFS and install Team Explorer, do you think it will be automatically available in the VS Shell app?

Any ideas? have you worked on making this happen?

Thanks

Solution

  • Just stumbled on this question, it might still be relevant to you.

    You have the option of including the AnkhSVN (http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net/) packages and load it into your Isolated Shell. While there are some issues around it, with Subversion support, you could use SvnBridge to access TFS repositories. This might bring you a little bit closer to the process you are trying to achieve.