Question

I have a Winform Gui that serves various purposes. I am creating an additional plugin, that if present, adds another tabpage to my tabcontrol and then adds the required controls, etc.

My question is, am I best coding this into the main app, ie ‘if dll present create this view’ or should I code it into the dll and use reflection? Is it possible using reflection?

Thanks/

Answer 1

You should maybe look into existing framework that does exactly what you are looking for. For exemple, Managed Extensibility Framework MEF

MEF presents a simple solution for the
runtime extensibility problem. Until
now, any application that wanted to
support a plugin model needed to
create its own infrastructure from
scratch. Those plugins would often be
application-specific and could not be
reused across multiple
implementations. MEF provides a
standard way for the host application
to expose itself and consume external
extensions. Extensions, by their
nature, can be reused amongst
different applications. However, an
extension could still be implemented
in a way that is application-specific.
Extensions themselves can depend on
one another and MEF will make sure
they are wired together in the correct
order (another thing you won’t have to
worry about). MEF offers a set of
discovery approaches for your
application to locate and load
available extensions.

Or if you need to be in seperate app domain, you can use Managed Addin Framework MAF

But in your case I think MEF should do the trick.
Might be overkill though if you just have this one scenario … but it’s an option.