AddIn Developer Quick Start Guide

This guide is essentially a transcript of Daniel's Developer Tutorial Video.

Introduction

In this tutorial you are going to create a very simple Add-in for SharpDevelop that will add a "hello world" pad to the SharpDevelop GUI, as shown below.

PICTURE 1 - GUI with our add-in

Pre-requisites

Before you can get started with developing your add-in you are going to need:

• A normal installation of SharpDevelop IDE (get one here)
• .Net Framework and SDK (get them here)
• A SubVersion client (e.g. Tortoise SVN)
• A nice clean directory to work in (we will be using C:\Dev)

Setup

To develop our add-in you are going to need two versions of SharpDevlop on your machine.

One copy (the development copy) you will use to edit and compile your add-in, it is normal to use a regular binary release for this purpose.

The second copy of SharDevelop is a runtime target. That is, you will build your add-in against this copy. But also you will run this copy to load and debug your add-in. It is normal to use a source copy of SharpDevelop for this purpose and to compile it yourself to include debug information: this will allow you to step through and inspect SharpDevelop code as well as that of your add-in.

To get a source copy of SharpDevelop you need to download it from the SubVersion repository (this is known in SubVersion as a "checkout"). Open a Windows Explorer in C:\Dev. Right click inside the folder and select "SVN Checkout...".

PICTURE

The Tortoise SVN dialog appears, you need to tell it where the SharpDevelop SubVersion repository is. Entersvn://svnmirror.sharpdevelop.net/sharpdevelop/branches/2.1/SharpDevelop into the "URL of the repository" field and click OK.

PICTURE

Tortoise will now check out the whole of SharpDevelop for you to work against. This is several hundred files and can take several minutes to fully download. When completed you should see the source code in your folder.

Now you need to compile SharpDevelop so that you can run it (and your add-in) later on. Don't worry - the SharpDevelop team make this really easy for you. Navigate to the src directory and double click on debugbuild.bat - this will now compile SharpDevelop with debugging information. Once again this can be a lengthy process depending on your machine and it's memory/processor.

PICTURE

Now you have a debug copy of SharpDevelop that will act as a runtime target for your new addins.

Writing the add-in

Open your **development version **of SharpDevelop (not the source one you just downloaded but the one you ran setup.exe to install)