Distributing a Visual Studio Isolated Shell application

Question

I'm thinking about implementing an application using the Visual Studio isolated shell. The way to include the dependencies is including the Visual Studio isolated shell redistributable package, but it's 221.6Mb. It's very big for us.

Do you know any other alternative, maybe distributing only the DLLs that you're using?

For example, I only need Docking Windows system and the editor. Could I only add some lighter DLLs packed in my installer?

Answer 1

Answer is no; although, you can in theory break the installer and get it to work with much smaller foo print. However, note that your EULA doesn't permit you to do such distribution. As for the theoretical possibility of making such (smaller) distribution, I haven't seen any write up on doing one so far but it's any other MSI in existence, you may not be able to achieve this as easy with pre-VS2012 builds but, with the right level of understanding on MSI and COM and ample time in hand to experiment, you may have luck with VS2012. I did not try this myself though.