cairoshell VS MonoDevelop

https://github.com/cairoshell/cairoshell

Well I mean I think you can kill explorer.exe and use your custom ui (see cairo shell) but you can't completely rewrite compositor and add functionality to it

Look Yourself

https://github.com/cairoshell/cairoshell you could try this

Cairo Shell is not really a "desktop app" and more of a "desktop" in itself.

This makes sense in both small and medium sized operations and can save quite a bit of money. Zero licensing costs, ease of administration, ease of backup, DR options from replication. You can even add a thin desktop layer with something like Cairo Desktop Environment to allow local management.

And what does 'pre-installed' software mean? Windows Explorer (the start menu is part of this) is pre-installed and not core to the operating system, and third party solutions work (https://github.com/cairoshell/cairoshell for instance) - does the OS boot into nothing? Same goes with the default shell in Android

An older version of the underlying source code remains available: https://github.com/mono/monodevelop

From what I understand MonoDevelop has been discontinued. Even their repo has been archived.

SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop are both dead and focused for devs which gives them different priority than apps targeted at non-devs, but they show how to put together seriously complex apps, and they're the ancestor of the Visual Studio for Mac.

Monodevelop

There are Linux binaries for MonoDevelop which is what VS for Mac is based on.

Using Visual Studio with Wine is not really possible. But you have other IDEs as options. You can pack Visual Studio Code with the needed plugins. You can use MonoDevelop which is the IDE from the Mono project https://www.monodevelop.com/. Something to add here, the Mono project is actually developed by Microsoft. And there is Jetbrains Rider, I personally use it every day at work and am kind of in love, but it costs you 139 € in the first year.