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DXCore plug-ins overview

August 16th, 2010

These are two primary types of plug-ins you can create:

  1. Standard Plug-in

The standard plug-in is a workhorse of the extensibility landscape. It serves as a container for DXCore components, such as actions, providers, and your custom event handlers.

  • Tool Window

Tool windows are modeless forms that can be docked inside the Visual Studio IDE. The Solution Explorer, Toolbox, and Property Browser are all examples of tool window plug-ins. Creating a tool window plug-in is easy. Just arrange your components in the tool window designer, set a few properties, and compile the project.

You can also add some additional project items into your plug-in project:

Custom pages participate in the Options Dialog. If your plug-in has any kind of user-configuration, this is a way to go. Option pages offer a number of advantages over a custom roll-your-own approach.

A particular plug-in can be written in CSharp or Visual Basic languages only. Unfortunately, you can’t use the C++ language to write a plug-in, because this language has diverged from the common wizard model in Visual Studio (which other languages use), causing this support to be very non-trivial to add to DXCore.

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Products: DXCore
Versions: all
VS IDEs: any
Updated: Feb/10/2011
ID: D004

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