Monday, April 27, 2009

How do I test my DXCore Plugin?

A simple enough question but it deserves a bit of thought.

You’ll recall from my previous post on creating a plugin, I suggested indicating that your plugin was a “Community plugin”

The reason for this was to prevent multiple copies of studio from loading and thus locking the plugin dll that you were working on.

So this leads you to a small problem… How to get the DXCore to load your plugin if you have explicitly asked it not to?

Well here’s how…

Simply open up the plugin manager from the DevExpress\Tool Windows\Plug-in Manager.

 

Side note: If you are using one of the free DXCore products, then you may not have such a menu. In order to acquire access to this most useful of facilities you’ll need to do a bit of registry hackery.
The following solution was provided in the AlexS (Another very helpful DevExpress employee)  in the DevExpress IDE Tools Forums
-------------------------------------------------------------
Please invoke the Registry editor, add the "HideMenu" DWORD value to the following Registry key, and set its Value to 0:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Developer Express\CodeRush for VS\9.1
This should make the "DevExpress" menu visible.
-------------------------------------------------------------

DevExpressPluginManagerMenuOption

…to reveal this…

PluginManagerHelloWorld

Simply double click the entry you would like to load and, after confirmation your action, the DXCore will load your plugin.

All should now be good and you can commence testing your plugin..


3 comments:

Unknown said...

I have been reading over your blog on the CodeRush and DXCore plugins, It has been very intersting. I have one question. I performed your Registry hack as you have it listed in this current article. When VS2008 startsup I see the DevExpress menu but before the project has completed loading it disappears. Is there any thing you can think of that would cuase
this? I do apoligize for asking a question on your commetns section but I thought you would be able to direct me. BTW I have the CodeRush Express install currently.

Rory said...

Hey Dudley.

No problem man.. I'm happy to try to answer any CR questions you might have... If you want you can also mail me directly - (Rorybecker@gmail.com)

I'm not entirely sure what to say here... The hack is something I got direct from the DevExpress forums.

Perhaps your version of Coderush Xpress is a different version ? This might affect which registry key needs setting.
If this yields nothing then I would suggest posting a "Question" to the Support Center (http://www.devexpress.com/sc/)

This should give you a reference to the question. If you post that back here I can follow the progress of the question along with you.

Sorry I can't be of more help in this case. I don't use Xpress myself as I have the full version (v9.2.0 early alpha at the current time)

Rory said...

I had a quick look myself....

Perhaps this link might help (http://www.devexpress.com/Support/Center/p/Q142362.aspx)