Deployment of add-ins, managed?

[ocroquette]

Hi!

I was wondering how you guys are deploying your plug-ins. The EA documentation describes the manual procedure, using regedit, but while that's OK for development purpose, I can't imagine that it's the optimal way to deploy them on the users PC.

So how do you do it?

I am just thinking too that EA could support the concept of plugins, that you could install and deinstall within EA, without having to resort to regedit and other deprecated techniques...

[thomaskilian]

What would be the problem with the registry? I mean: this is Windoze

[Eric Johannsen]

I created a "framework" just once in C# that knows how to interact with the COM layer in EA.  That framework uses file monitoring and reflection to load any .NET DLL's that I drop into a specific directory.  That way, once the framework is built and installed, any additional DLLs that I create (in C# or another .NET language) can be deployed via a simple file copy.

The framework itself is installed with a normal setup project in Visual Studio 2005.  It manages the COM registration for me (creates a .msi file that the user runs, which registers the framework for COM interop).

Eric

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Hi Eric,

Care to share it on the EA Users' Wiki?

Paolo

[Jeff Odell]

I used a regular Visual Studio 2005 Setup project.  You have to create the registry entry as well as make sure the assembly is marked to register as a COM object in the setup project.