Taking your first steps with spicIE

Mostly Technical Content - First steps with “SpicIE – Simple Plug-In Creator for Internet Explorer”

“There is a new plug-in framework out there which you can use to easily create browser extensions for Internet Explorer 7/8.

To use the SpicIE framework you have to download it from the http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/SpicIE location. The current version is Beta 0.81. If you have installed an older version the new setup first asks you to uninstall the older version.

Then you can start the setup.exe During the setup simply choose all default setup options.

…

After SpicIE is installed on your computer you will have in your start menu a new entry with the name SpicIE and following subentries/options which can be started directly from the start menu:

• Open the project and source code of the SpicIE framework – “SpicIE – Simple Plug-In Creator for Internet Explorer.sln” with Visual Studio 2008
• Open the project and source code of the SpicIE Sample project – “SpicIE – SamplePlugin.sln”
• Open the documentation of SpicIE – “SpicIE documentation”
• Open some separate install/deinstall instructions for your own created plug-in – “SpicIE – Installation and Deinstallation Guide.htm”

…

The SpicIE base project is a C# project with some simple structure and three namespaces – “Common, Controls, Parameter”. If you look at the code metrics of the solution you can see that the whole framework has about 1233 lines of code. The biggest class is the class “Host”. The source file of host.cs has about 474 lines of code.

…

The sample plug-in project has much more classes but less code. You can start the sample project simply by hitting F5. Then your Visual Studio 2008 brings up the SamplePlugin in debug mode. To debug an IE browser extension the Internet Explorer has to be started. This is automatically done by Visual Studio 2008 via the project debug settings. They are configured as follows.

…

You can add at any position of the sample plug-in project break points to understand and debug the code.

…”

This is a nice “Getting Starting” with spicIE guide… From install to sample plugin to disabling it (the sample plugin).

 

Related Past Post XRef:
Spice up your IE with spicIE – Writing IE7/8 Plugins in managed code in minutes (beta)