When I wrote about free Ruby on Rails IDEs last Wednesday, I drew a comment from "teki321:" "I would never put 'Ruby in Steel' in the context of free. It's an extension for a commercial application, which is not free." That's currently true, but I wasn't really thinking in those terms. It's free for people who already have Visual Studio 2005 Standard or above. The Ruby in Steel folks have mentioned to me their w When I wrote about free Ruby on Rails IDEs last Wednesday, I drew a comment from “teki321:” “I would never put ‘Ruby in Steel’ in the context of free. It’s an extension for a commercial application, which is not free.” That’s currently true, but I wasn’t really thinking in those terms. It’s free for people who already have Visual Studio 2005 Standard or above. The Ruby in Steel folks have mentioned to me their wish that their product worked as an add-on to one or more of the free Visual Studio Express products. They’re certainly not the only VSIP partner to feel that way. A little later this year, all of these partners can have their wish, if they build their product with the Visual Studio 2008 Shell. “If you create software development tools, you’ll want to consider building on the Visual Studio 2008 Shell. A streamlined Visual Studio development environment, the Visual Studio Shell provides the core foundation so you can focus on building your application’s unique features. Flexible customization options help you deliver optimized experiences for specific markets.” How does this help? The Visual Studio Shell will be free, and also royalty-free. When does this miracle happen? The Visual Studio Shell will be available to Visual Studio Industry Partners (VSIP) partners with Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 and will be available to the broader development community with the release of Visual Studio 2008. The Visual Studio Shell will be available by web download alongside the Visual Studio SDK. There will be two modes of the Visual Studio Shell, integrated and isolated. The former is for languages, and the latter is for applications. So there you have it. Who says that the only thing worse than being a Microsoft competitor is being a Microsoft partner? Software Development