App Dev Manager Andrew Kanieski explores how to track down app dependencies on Visual Studio Isolated Shell.

Premier Support for Developers is used in all manner of ways to support your organization’s needs. Sometimes we work with IT organizations to help in updating or removing older, out of support versions of our software from production across entire enterprise landscapes. At times this means working with hundreds of thousands of computers.

In some cases it can be a challenge to identify what software is installed and present on machines across customer networks. Today we have one specific example, Visual Studio Isolated Shell. If you’re wondering what VS Isolated Shell is, take a quick read through this primer.

Why are old versions of VS Isolated Shell a challenge to upgrade/remove? VS Isolated Shell is just a component of a product, used by Microsoft and other third party vendors, to write software. That being said, if you are like many enterprise customers, you might not have a firm grasp of what products are leveraging this component.

For Microsoft products the answer is easy, we use VS Shell with SQL Server Management Studio, Visual Studio, just to name a few products. But there are an untold number of vendors that could also be using VS Isolated Shell.

Continue reading on Andrew’s blog