Is Shell an Visual Studio edition just like express, professional etc ?
I had VS2010 Shell installed on my machine but was not able to open many projects in it. Can any one help please. Never headred about this edition.
Visual Studio Shell is a base for developing some parts of IDEs. If you want, you can use it to create your own programming environment instead of starting from the zero.
All Visual Studio (C#, C++, VB.Net, Web), shares some of the shell functions, implementing the environment specific on each one, and configuring bunch of parameters on the shell.
Some 3rd party uses Visual Studio Shell too, like Atmel Studio.
More about: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/vstudio/bb685612.aspx
Note: I don't think you will open any project in the shell itself, it will open under the correct implemented IDE troght a selector application and its registered IDEs.
Couldn't explain it better than Diego could. I would like to add that to open projects you'll also need visual studio (and the correct shell) installed. The shell just adds some additional tooling etc...
来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19019306/what-is-visual-studio-2010-shell