Jason He's WebLog

From the last blog post, we understand that we need new contract at the isolation boundary to route AddIn calls to and from the Host. We defined 3 new contracts IAddInRenderArgsContract IAddInSurfaceContract and IAddInColorBgraContract. As we discussed...

If the reader is familiar with Paint.Net, you will notice that we cannot really write a functional AddIn without referencing Paint.Net’s library. There are data types that are only available in Paint.Net. Many CLR AddIn adopters will soon come up with...

AddIn can be passed to multiple Hosts, or it can have multiple references for the same Host. How to manage the lifetime of an AddIn becomes a big challenge. In the old COM world, we would do reference counting; allowing each AddIn increment the reference...

Our CLR AddIn team has a blog site available on http://blogs.msdn.com/clraddins/ That will be a great place to ask general questions and to give feedback. BTW, Jack and Jesse wrote an MSDN article. You can find it here. http://msdn.microsoft...

Managing the lifecycle of an AddIn is not trivial. AddIn may be in-process or out-of process, AddIns may share one AppDomain, AddIn my stay in its own AppDomain, AdddIn may stay in Host’s AppDomain, one AddIn may have multiple host views, AddIn may have...

In the AddIn discovery blog, we already knew that we could get a collection of AddInToken from discovery API. AddInToken stores the full pipeline information and can be used to activate an AddIn. Before host start to activate an AddIn, it has many decisions...

AddInView is an abstract class and AddIn should inherit from it. Here is the code for AddInView and AddIn. namespace PaintDotNetAddInViews { [ AddInBase ] public abstract class PDNAddInView { public abstract void Render(); ...

Once we load an AddIn in an AppDomain, we need to think about its lifetime management. There are questions like how to keep it alive in a remoting environment? What happens when we disconnect an AddIn with the host? When should we unload the AddIn appdomain...

We did not talk about anything about versioning. Versioning is a big challenge for Host and AddIn developers. Whenever Host or AddIn has an upgrade, versioning and compatibility becomes a big problem. Our AddIn model is trying to solve the versioning...

Host Side View (HSV) is exactly what the name indicates. It is the view of an AddIn from Host’s eyes. It is an abstract class usually defined by the Host. AddIn developers will implement all the functionalities and return result to the Host via HSV. ...

Paint.Net can host multiple AddIns. We can let the user pick which AddIn to use. To discover all the AddIns on the machine, we provided a few really simple APIs to do that. First, host needs to know where to discover all the AddIns and Pipelines (pipelines...

I am recently working on the AddIn model for the .Net Framework. There are many Hosts, AddIns, and Pipelines written internally to test our current model. One day, this idea popped out. How about adding AddIn model to a real-life project and see how good...