This has been one of the most requested features we've had since people started learning more about our model and playing with the bits and I'm very happy to announce that we have published this on CodePlex: http://www.codeplex.com/clraddins/Wiki/View.aspx?title=Pipeline%20Builder For a particular...

We’ve been receiving a lot of questions recently regarding the support for Windows Forms based add-ins and hosts in a multi-AppDomain environment. Now that we’ve released .NetFX 3.5 with the support for passing WPF controls across AppDomains the lack of direct support from Windows Forms becomes more...

We just released VS 2008 and .Net 3.5 Beta 2 (code name "Orcas"). You may download the release here . What’s new? 1. UI extensibility By far the most requested feature has been UI extensibility built upon the Add-In model. We are very happy to announce that we have delivered a solution...

Let’s discuss the specifics of the construction of the add-in, the isolation boundary and the pipeline in the add-in model – i.e. activation. I’ll be referring to the discovery and activation as discussed here and the segments of the add-in pipeline as discussed here . Let’s say you have discovered a...

Some of you may have noticed already but for those who haven't I'd like to announce one of the major new System.AddIn features that made it into March's Orcas CTP . We've now made it possible for hosts to activate add-ins in a seperate process with the same ease as in a seperate AppDomain. We're very...

The second of two articles we wrote for MSDN magazine was published online today (and available in news stands now): http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/03/CLRInsideOut/default.aspx This article discusses the System AddIn pipeline and we promised to show the utilization of the model to enable...

Details about the System.AddIn’s Implementation of Add-In Discovery Last time we discussed several common approaches to add-in discovery and some of the pros and cons of each. We reviewed type hierarchy, custom attribute, and xml manifest based discovery systems and primarily evaluated them on...

One of the first problems you try to solve when adding extensibility to your application is that of discovery: how do you find the add-ins to your application? Depending on the application, and what happens to pop into your head at the time, you may go in different directions. I’ve seen solutions where...

The first of two articles we wrote for MSDN magazine was published online today (and available in newstands now): http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/07/02/CLRInsideOut/default.aspx This article introduces you to our APIs and walks through a sample application hosting add-ins. Next month we'll...

We’re a new feature team in the CLR that is tasked with making it easy for managed applications to host add-ins (and plug-ins, add-ons, extensions, ...) . These features will first be included in the Orcas version of Visual Studio and the .Net Framework and most of our features are in the latest Orcas...