Review: CodeBrarian VS.NET Add-In Framework

My first "official" review is on Brady Gaster's CodeBrarian Add-In framework. Brady first mentioned his framework on his weblog, and states:

"The goal of Codebrarian is to provide a flexible, extensible Visual Studio.NET add-in that other developers can extend as they see fit."

I have to say, it truly is flexible, and extensible, making a plugin super-easy for those of us who do not know how to do such a thing (I'm included in this ). Brady's framework installs a VS.NET addin that allows you to plug-n-play new plugins that inherit from his interface. The documentation is nowhere to be found, but I found it extremely easy to understand once I opened up Codebrarian.dll in Reflector and followed his Highlightor plugin.

After I understood what needed to be done, I started my own plugin to interface with WebDeploy (don't expeect this to be released, any time soon that is). After adding a reference, I created a new class and implemented the plugin interface, added a the MenuText and CommandName properties, and just re-displayed the FilePath that was passed into ProcessCodeFile. After building, I dropped the compiled assembly into the Codebrarian's directory, restarted VS.NET, and wahla! My plugin was active and working.

As this is the first public release, its pretty well "built tough." (thanks Ford!) I would personally like to see more options on where the plugin architecture would come into play, like instead of having it only in the solution explorer, but in the editor screen, and in a menu item. The plugin's themselves can tell the architecture where they would like to be shown, and depending on where the plugin was activated, a different procedure can be called.

Truly a simple plugin architecture, I give it 4 floppy disks!