.Net Plugin Application Architecture

During the holiday period, I started seriously playing with building a .Net application that was based on a plugin architecture.

First I wanted to do it the hard way, the better to really understand what was going on, how to best build it, etc, etc. After a while I had a simple application where I could plugin new funcationality without recompiling the primary application. Yeah!

What a pain. I had the simplest implementation working. Now all I needed was to use a new AppDomain, show copy, dynamic plugin loading, etc, etc. I.e. a real implementation.

Now that I'd done it the hard way, I decided it was time to punt and not try to reinvent the wheel. I've posted about MSINC.Plugins before and now was the time to use it.

Oh my. Talk about making my life easier. That library just rocks. In just minutes I had replaced my cheese/hard way plugin architecture with MSINC.Plugins. And now I had a real plugin application. Now that's cool...

If you're looking at implementing plugins in your application, take a look at this library.


Now it's time to actually build some plugins... :)

PS. It seems MS-INC's site (http://www.ms-inc.net) is current down. Hopefully it's "just a thing"...