What is the Visual Studio shell (standalone shell) good for?

Question

Is it some sort of pre-built GUI scaffolding?
Why would I Want it instead of a WinForms UI, which is quick to set up?
What does it give me that I would have to spend

Answer 1

I realized I'm late to the party on this, but back in the day when Sybase released versions 12 and 12.5 of PowerBuilder, they included a .NET version of each product. It was PowerBuilder running in the Visual Studio Isolated Shell. Honestly if you ask me, they did an outstanding job on it. The only drawback was that it was initially focused on generating WPF targets, assemblies, etc. But you couldn't do WinForm development (within PowerBuilder .NET). You had to deploy that through the PowerBuilder Classic interface.

Recently I've been getting into some Python and I remembered that one of the groups had also developed a Python deployment using the isolated shell. But I can't seem to find anything additional on it.

Granted, I realize that Python can be written in Visual Studio now, but just was trying to dig into the history. I noticed last night when I was digging that the isolated shell is available all the way through 2015.

Does anybody know if it has been discontinued?