Question Creating and Extending My Application with .DLL functionality

[alwilson]

Good Afternoon All,

I am a bit new around here, this is my first post - so hope you're all doing well.

I am (self professed) intermediate level developer - I was hoping someone could point me in the right direction - I want to write an app that can be extended with a plugin, ultimately, a DLL dropped in the appropriate folder to extend the functionality of my app.

Does anyone have advice or a link for assisting with this?

It's currently taking on the form of an MDI window, and each child window is spawned from a DLL, so basic functionality would be included with he dll basic.dll, and each new addition I create can be compiled into newfeature001.dll and loaded into the application and used as a new mdi child window.

I've no plan to extend this to 3rd party developers to extend, simply me, at home.

Any thought, links, suggestions?

Cheers
Alex

 

[jmcilhinney]

There are a number of ways to create plugin-based applications but the most recent and the preferred option is using the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF). Search for that and you should find plenty of information, but be prepared for a learning curve.