The Plug-in Manifest Generator

The section describes how plug-in projects are built and how the plug-in manifest is generated.

Plug-in Manifest Generator

When creating a plug-in project using the Plug-in project template, the project file will contain the following piece of custom content:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildBinPath)\Sdl.Core.PluginFramework.Build.targets" />
<Target Name="AfterBuild">
  <CreatePluginManifestTask ProjectDirectory="$(ProjectDir)" AssemblyFilePath="$(TargetPath)" PluginResxFilePath="$(ProjectDir)PluginResources.resx" />
</Target>

This piece of content tells MSBuild to run an additional build task after the assembly has successfully been built: the CreatePluginManifestTask.

This task will use .Net reflection to enumerate all the types in the assembly and identify types that are annotated with an attribute deriving from ExtensionAttribute, i.e. the extensions. It will write the type name of the extensions accompanied by the serialized extension attribute to the plug-in manifest file, which is created in a "plugins" subfolder of the project output folder and is named ASSEMBLYNAME.plugin.xml.

On top of creating the plug-in manifest, the task will also create .Net resource files for resources defined in the PluginResources.resx file. This resource file contains all strings and images referred to by extension attribute declarations in the plug-in assembly. When multiple language version of the PluginResources.resx file are present, it the task will also create resource files for those, all in the "plugins" folder.

The CreatePluginManifestTask also performs validation of the extension attribute declarations, checking for instance whether a value has been specified for all required properties and whether the all extensions implement the interface imposed by the extension point they are targeting. See also Compile-time Validation.

Currently the Sdl.Core.PluginFramework.Build assembly, containing the CreatePluginManifestTask is deployed in the GAC.

Note

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