It occurs to me that we may have forgotten to tell you about something important … sorry! Of course if you were at either of the recent Synergex DevPartner conferences then you will already know this, but if not then “listen up” because this could save you some money!

The development environment for Synergy .NET is provided by Microsoft Visual Studio. For Synergy 9 we support Visual Studio 2010 Professional or higher. If a developer wants to develop with Synergy .NET then they would install Synergy/DE and Visual Studio 2010, and then install “Synergy Language Integration for Visual Studio” (we call it SLI because it’s less of a mouthful) to add all of the Synergy .NET capabilities and templates alongside the other Microsoft languages like C# and Visual Basic. Many developers already have Visual Studio 2010 so this isn’t a problem … but what if you don’t?

Well … good news! In addition to purchasing Visual Studio 2010 there is also a free solution. It’s called Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated) and you can download it directly from Microsoft. Basically the Integrated Shell is a bare bones version of Visual Studio, with all of the other languages stripped out. It’s not much use on its own, but if you install it and then install SLI … hey presto you have a full Synergy .NET development environment!

If you do decide to try this out then please remember that Synergy .NET requires Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1, so you’ll need to install that after installing Integrated Shell, but before installing SLI.

You can download the files that you’ll need from these locations:

Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated)

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=115

Visual Studio 2010 Service Pack 1

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23691

By the way, when Synergy 10 is released later this year you will have a choice of two development environments. We’ll continue to support Visual Studio 2010, but we’ll also support Visual Studio 2012 … and there is an Integrated Shell available for it too, but the requirements are a little different. There is also something called Visual Studio 2012 RC Shell (Isolated), and you have to install that before you can install the Integrated Shell.

Visual Studio 2012 RC Shell (Isolated)

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29927

Visual Studio 2012 RC Shell (Integrated)

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29912

By the way, it appears that the Visual Studio 2012 RC Integrated Shell installation may have a problem. I found that it reported errors about missing components when I tried to install it. I also found that if I did a reboot between installing Isolated Shell and Integrated Shell – the errors went away!

If you do decide to play with Synergy 10 (the beta will be out very soon now) and Visual Studio 2012, and we really hope that you all will, remember that Visual Studio 2012 is currently release candidate. When the final product ships later in the year there will be new Isolated and Integrated shells to download and install.