* NOTE: THIS DOCUMENTATION IS STILL BEING DEVELOPED AND IMPROVED.
A BLIde plugin is a .net dll that contains code that BLIde can interact to. Those plug-ins can be used to add additional features to BLIde, modify existing ones, etc.
When BLIde starts, BLIde will call all the 'Main' procedure of its plugins, so the plugins start with BLIde too. Once this is done, the plugins become literally part of BLIde.
As instance, we can create a PlugIn to make BLIde provide intellisense when the BLIde user uses the KeyDown or KeyHit commands (so it gets a list of all available key codes). Or we could make a plug-in to process the bmx text in a file before the file is sent to the BlitzMax compiler (a pre-compiler). Or we could add a complete GUI editor to BLIde... the list of ideas is just as long as your imagination!
When BLIde is started by any BLIde user, the plugins are started using this simple execution schema:
that is, BLIde, from its execution context, launches any sdk plug-in. But when we're seriously developing a BLIde plugin, the thing is that we need to set BLIde inside the running context of Visual Studio, so when BLIde loads the Plugin DLL we're developing, we can debug and modify the code while the application is running. To do so, we need to modify the running context this way:
That means, we're running a debug session of Visual Studio. The program (BLIde Launcher) will start BLIde AND will tell BLIde to load the DLL we're also editing on the visual Studio session.
In other words, to make things easier, in order to create a BLIde plugin from Visual Studio, we need to be editing a solution with 2 programs: One program that launches BLIde telling BLIde to load our plugin, and the other program has to be the plugin itself.