The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 4 (of 5)

c# plugin framework

Hi ! First, this is a great site and a fab community.

I'm looking for links / books about how to manage apps using plugins.

The app should be a barebone winform app with a tabbed interface to the sub-applications. The sub-apps must be able to add their own menu items to the main app, and they have their own winforms GUI ofcourse..

Good leads welcome. Sorry for the simple question - I do know google, but maybe you have some useful input.

Thanks!

Darris
Thursday, May 6, 2004

That sounds like what Wrox covered in their book ".NET Enterprise Development in C#: From Design to Deployment", by Matthew Reynolds and Karli Wilson.

I remember reading it (seems like years ago now) and I think it covers what you're interested in. You used to be able to download the code from the Wrox website, so it might be worth looking into.

Steve Jones (UK)
Thursday, May 6, 2004

Have you looked at the .CSharp code project, I think there is good doc in the technotes section on plugins.

http://www.icsharpcode.net/TechNotes/

PaulT
Thursday, May 6, 2004

For what it's worth, all of the Microsoft Office applications support the IDTExtensibility2 interface, which defines how add-ins integrate into the main Office applications. There are lots of articles on MSDN on how to create your own add-ins. Perhaps this could be a starting point....

Robert Jacobson
Thursday, May 6, 2004

Thanks guys!

Darris
Friday, May 7, 2004

Here's another way to do plugins:

http://www.divil.co.uk/net/articles/plugins/plugins.asp

Slartibartfast
Friday, May 7, 2004

Here is a link to article on MSDN Magazine:
Designing Extensible Windows Forms Applications by Dino Esposito.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/02/07/CuttingEdge/default.aspx

This can be extended to come up with such a GUI framework.
You could have empty Menu, toolbar on Main Form which could be replaced by the plug-in form that is brought in view. The operations in the form could be self-contained in the form via button clicks and right click context menus or the form's menu that replaces (or merges with) the main form.

Hope that helps.
Anup Pant

anup pant
Sunday, May 9, 2004

Codeproject.com has a few different articles covering plugin frameworks. Some good, some not so good.

Once you get the hang of it you will be able to understand the differences in the plugin interfaces.

You should first understand how the plugin framework works with Reflection and Interfaces and how one plugin relates to the host and other plugins.

Jay
Monday, May 17, 2004