Experimental Instance of Visual Studio

To safeguard your Visual Studio development environment from untested applications that might change it, the Visual Studio SDK provides an alternative Visual Studio instance that you can use to experiment. You develop new applications by using Visual Studio as usual, but you run them by using this experimental instance.

To start Visual Studio by using the experimental instance, run the following command at the command prompt in the Visual Studio Command window:

"<Visual studio installation path>\Common7\IDE\devenv.exe" /RootSuffix Exp

Note

In Visual Studio Shell the experimental instance is written under HKEY_CURRENT_USER rather than under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.

We recommend that you run your VSPackage in the experimental instance while you are developing it. You then deploy the VSPackage to the regular instance. For more information about registering applications, see Registering VSPackages.