I think the idea of the visual studio shell is to have sort of a blank slate of an IDE for people to write their own plugins for. There's no language support, j

I think the idea of the visual studio shell is to have sort of a blank slate of an IDE for people to write their own plugins for. There's no language support, just the blank canvas. Anyway microsoft doesn't provide support for their core languages (C#/C++/VB) for the shell, so the main consequence is that, in the shell you basically get all the languages microsoft /doesn't/ directly support in visual studio, but nothing else. Whereas in the express editions you have an IDE you can't extend, but each edition supports one of microsoft's core languages.