Should a new Visual Studio-Based Application be based on 2008 or 2010?

Question

I am thinking of creating a product based on the Visual Studio Shell (primarily isolated mode). Since Visual Studio 2010 will most likely be RTM before my product, does it make sense to start with VS2010 as a base rather than VS2008?

Has anyone looked at what they changed in connection to the shell framework and if it is improved enough to warrant using it over the better documented and not-beta 2008?

Sickness

@Nathan, I corrected my answer, make sure you read it. Aaron works for MS on VS Extensability. – Indemonstrable

Answer 1

The editor extensability model is changed radically since it is based off MEF and WPF in 2010. If you extend the editor on 2008, it is likely you will have to make quite a few changes to get stuff working in 2010.

However, a large amount of the extensability still depends on the old VSIP/COM which remain unchanged.

If you plan on shipping with the 2010 time frame I think skipping 2008 is not a bad idea.

Indemonstrable

This is partially true since it depends on what areas you're customizing. The Editor extensibility model in VS 2010 is indeed driven by MEF and is much different than VS 2008 and earlier. However, most of the rest of Visual Studio 2010 uses the same VSIP/COM interfaces as in previous iterations of Visual Studio. – Evangelista

Thanks for pointing that out. Initial functionality should be outside the editor, but I will probably get into editor extensibility before 1.0, so 2010 is probably the best option. – Sickness

Answer 2

Speaking as one who is working on a product based on VS2008 shell I would strongly suggest to use VS2010 instead as base. They have cleaned up their interface and probably fixed a lot of the bugs that are in the VS2008 shell. I think they would also be more sensitive to bugs than when they happen in the "old" VSShell.

Quinidine

Do you know how the documentation on VS2010 compares to VS2008? Is it still fairly undocumented? – Sickness

No I don't, at least it can be worse ;-) – Quinidine

Answer 3

This is really not a technical question, in my mind - you need to think about your customers before yourself - is there a large enough crowd of people who use vs08?
(I encountered a similar question and concluded that for my scenario - I need to support VS08)

Grassy

Although since I am looking at using the isolated VS Shell rather than a VS plug-in, what versions of visual studio end users have (or don't have) is not an issue for me. – Sickness