SimplePluginLoader

A project that makes it easier to add plugins to C# applications.

Create a projects that loads plugin with one interface and two line of code. It is easy, just use three steps:

Step 1 - Create your plugin interface:

public interface IMyObject 
{
    string Name { get; set; }
    void DoSomething();
}

Step 2 - Load the plugins from a plugins directory in two lines of code:

    var pluginLoader = new PluginLoader<IMyObject>();
    var plugins = pluginLoader.LoadPlugins();

Step 3 - Do something with your plugins. This loads the dlls. Now, each dll could have multiple plugins, so we get all the plugins from all the dlls like this.

    foreach (var plugin in plugins)
    {
      foreach (var pluginObj in plugin.Objects) 
      {
        plugin.DoSomething();
      }
    }

Note: you could short this with linq if you want. Like this:

    foreach (var plugin in plugins.SelectMany(plugin => plugin.PluginObjects))
    {
      plugin.DoSomething();
    }

Yeah. I know. All the complexity of plugins just disappeared. Your welcome!

Handling Dependencies

A plugin may have dependencies of it's own. By default these are not loaded.

    foreach (var plugin in plugins)
    {
      plugin.AddDependencyResolver();
      foreach (var pluginObj in plugin.Objects) 
      {
        plugin.DoSomething();
      }
      plugin.RemoveDependencyResolver();
    }

Finding a plugin

You can require that plugins implement the very simple IName interface. Then you can easily find one plugin and use it.

    using (var pluginFinder = new PluginFinder<IMyObject>()) 
    {
      var plugin = pluginFinder.FindPlugin("MyPluginName", @"c:\my\path\to\the\plugins");
      plugin.DoSomething();
    }