What engine, version and capabilities of the web browser are used to display web pages inside Visual Studio 2010?

Question

My company is developing a plug-in / add-on for Visual Studio 2010. When a user asks for help for our product, we plan to open an HTML page (or set of pages) in Visual Studio. I help in the development and implementation of the help system.

• What web engine / version is used in Visual Studio 2010? According to Wikipedia , this is not Trident (!).
  • _{navigator.userAgent reports: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; OfficeLiveConnector.1.4; OfficeLivePatch.1.3; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)}
• Am I allowed to download remote JavaScript content (via the <script> element)?
• Am I allowed to use XHR to download remote content?
• Will my page be reliable and have access to FileSystemObject ?

I would appreciate any resources that you can give me in programming specifically for the "network" features of VisualStudio2010-as-a-browser.

Answer 1

In a 2007 Microsoft blog, Rob Mauceri seems to have developed a new layout engine for development purposes:

SharePoint Designer, Expression Web, and the next version of Visual Studio Visual Web Designer (codename Orcas) use the same stanards-based web design component. This component was developed jointly by three product groups for high-precision reproduction of web standards such as CSS, XHTML, and ASP.net.

It was about Visual Studio 2008, but I guess it will be the same in 2010.