Besides from missing the new/official name for the Visual Studio “Orcas” (it’s 2008 apparently, but might not ship in 2008) I completely missed one interesting low-key announcement from Microsoft: there will be a new product coming with the 2008 release called “Visual Studio Shell”.

It’s easy to explain what this is: it’s a GUI shell part of the regular Visual Studio, but the contents are up to you. Differently put, it’s a foundation for you to build your own tools based on the Visual Studio GUI platform. Doesn’t this sound familiar? Doesn’t Eclipse RCP offer similar set of functionality?

Yes and no. Visual Studio Shell is meant to be used for the development of IDE for custom tools and programming languages. In one of the deployment scenarios, your components will integrate into full Visual Studio (if installed on the target machine). In another, the shell and your content are installed as a standalone application. In both cases, the IDE is optimized for languages and tools but not for any kind of GUI application.

This is an important point. While some developers enamoured by their IDE might think it’s a good idea to build an end-user application that looks exactly the same as their IDE, end-users disagree. For most applications, zillions of dockable windows only add to the UI overload and confusion. I’ve been there and done that: only the most complex enterprise applications need this level of customizability. Look at mass product like Microsoft Office 2003 – it has task pane that looks like dockable pane, but there’s always at most one open (you can switch to different views inside the task pane though).

Eclipse RCP on the other hand advertises itself as a generic GUI tool. Unfortunately, I see this leading to the development of RCP based end-user apps by overzealous developers. This is not a big downside of the Eclipse RCP platform as such, I just think that it should be advertised for what it is – a tool that rose from the IDE meant for the creation of IDEs and tools. In fact, when you look at the list of available commercial RCP applications, you’ll notice that most of them are tools for engineers. It’s a good thing developers are applying common sense to this issue.

In any case, there are two platforms now for developers to base their tools on, both are free and well established. This is great news for those looking to build custom tools that are not really IDE plug-ins: not only do they get a basic GUI for free, but they don’t have to “force” their end-users to have the “full” IDE installed (in case of Visual Studio, this means that you don’t have to have a commercial version installed which saves money).