Registration of IDE plug-ins
Authentic Desktop maintains a specific key in the Registry where it stores all registered IDE plug-ins:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Altova\XML Spy\PlugIns
All values of this key are treated as references to registered plug-ins and must conform to the following format:
Value name: | ProgID of the plug-in |
Value type: | must be REG_SZ |
Value data: | CLSID of the component |
Each time the application starts the values of the "PlugIns" key is scanned, and the registered plug-ins are loaded.
Register plug-in manually
To register a plug-in manually, use the "Customize" dialog box of the Authentic Desktop "Tools" menu. Use the "Add Plug-In..." button to specify the DLL that implements your plug-in. Authentic Desktop registers the DLL as a COM server and adds the corresponding entry in its "PlugIns" key.
If you experience problems with manual registration you can check if the CLSID of your plug-in is correctly registered in the "PlugIns" key. If this is not the case, the name of your plug-in DLL was probably not sufficiently unique. Use a different name or perform direct registration.
Register plug-in directly
A plug-in can be directly registered as an IDE plug-in by first registering the DLL and then adding the appropriate value to the "PlugIns" key of Authentic Desktop during plug-in setup for example. The new plug-in will be activated the next time Authentic Desktop is launched.
Creating plug-ins
Source code for sample plug-ins has been provided in the application's (My) Documents folder: Examples\IDEPlugin folder. To build a plug-in from such source code, do the following:
1.Open the solution you want to build as a plug-in in Visual Studio.
2.Build the plug-in with the command in the Build menu.
3.The plug-in's DLL file will be created in the Bin or Debug folder. This DLL file is the file that must be added as a plug-in (see above).