Editing AddOn Studio for World of Warcraft documentation (section)

=== 1. Install the shell ===
''Install the free Microsoft Visual Studio or Isolated Shell''

With AddOn Studio 2010, the Isolated shell installs a stand-alone version of the Visual Studio, the 'ISO Shell'. With AddOn Studio 2015, installs the Community edition of Visual Studio. These are both free as in not costing anything, and free legally to download and install for your own use.

The install should go without a hitch and is fairly friendly. You can just choose the defaults, which will already have everything needed.

For the Isolated Shell with 2010, most of what it installs are prerequisites that any other application might have already installed, so the install may go quite quickly, and you do '''not''' need Visual Studio itself. For AddOn Studio 2010, if you already have the full Visual Studio 2010 installed you can skip this step. If you have Visual Studio 2010 Express, then you will still need the 2010 Isolated Shell. For AddOn Studio 2015, if any version of Visual Studio 2015 is already installed, except for Express versions, then you can skip this step also.

Installing Visual Studio Community for 2015 or Isolated Shell for 2010, will '''not''' interfere with an existing Visual Studio install of any kind. You only need to install this once, ever, and after this step you won't need anything else, except for AddOn Studio for WoW itself, to get started.