Source Control in Visual Studio Isolated Shell

Question

Hi,

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:

• Team Explorer for Isolated Shell
• Is it possible to use Team Explorer in VS Shell Isolated?

Answer 1

It sounds like you are trying to allow the "special content creators" save files in TFS Source Control without having to buy them a license to a Visual Studio Team Edition -- correct me if I'm wrong.

If that's the case, unfortunately I believe that you can't quite do that. Your users still need a Client Access License ("CAL") to access TFS.

I think that you can acquire just CALs for your users without having to buy Visual Studio for them (I presume for less than a full blown Visual Studio would cost). At that point, you can just distribute to them the Team Explorer, which is a VS shell with nothing but TFS access components. That is available in your TFS server media.

I found this via Google. You might want to review it to decide your best options:

Visual Studio Team System 2008 Licensing White Paper

The only exception to the CAL rules I'm aware of is access to Work Items. Assuming properly licensed servers, anyone in your organization can create new Work Items or view and update existing ones created by them, using the Work Item Web Access component.

Answer 2

Hi Euro,

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

Answer 3

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.