Tutorial 0 -  Preparing everything

Before starting with any of the tutorials, please, follow the instructions here and store a working template in your hard drive. This template will be copied and used as a starting point for any tutorial in this documentation. We'll call this template Empty Plugin Template.

How is a BLIde Plugin structured, and how dows it work?

A BLIde Plugin is a .net program that exposes a root module (shared static class) called Plugin, and additionally, this module has a method called Main.

BLIde when tries to load and start a Plugin will load the corresponding DLL in memory, look for a Module called Plugin (using reflection), and if the mdule is found, it'll call the Main method of this module.

In other words, all BLIde Plugins share this structure:

This way, BLIde knows how to load an start a Plugin, and this additionally open the doors to the development of Plug-ins in any language that can build .net dll such as Visual Basic, C#, Delphi, etc.

To C# developers: Take into consideration that BLIde will use non case sensitive reflection matching algorithms, so if you're coding in C#, you may not have a "PlugIn" and "plugin" shared classes, as BLIde wouldn't know wich one to call! (this also applies to the "Main" method).