Creating Add Ins

  • Thread starter Thread starter David S. Zuza
  • Start date Start date
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David S. Zuza

This is hard to find. I want to create a host program and then create add
ins for it that can extend it's functionality. Problem is, is that I am an
intermediate to new .NET programmer and I can't seem to find anything that
is useful and understandable on this. All I can find is how to create add
ins for VS and Office programs. It would seem that it should be fairly
straight forward in VS 2005 but its not. HELP!!!

Dave
 
This is hard to find. I want to create a host program and then create add
ins for it that can extend it's functionality. Problem is, is that I am an
intermediate to new .NET programmer and I can't seem to find anything that
is useful and understandable on this. All I can find is how to create add
ins for VS and Office programs. It would seem that it should be fairly
straight forward in VS 2005 but its not. HELP!!!

Dave
Click to expand...

Generally speaking you create an interface that defines what the
plugin is required to do. Then, when you go to load a plugin, you have
the main application use reflection to load up the plugin from a dll
and access the plugin parts through the interface you declared.

The following is in C#, but it should give you the basics of what
needs to happen:

http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/c__plugin_architecture.asp

And here's another article (again in C#) by Jon Skeet that describes
the solution to one of the most common problems with the plugin
architecture:

http://www.yoda.arachsys.com/csharp/plugin.html

Thanks,

Seth Rowe
 
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