So I downloaded the newest version of BLIde and tried out the plugin SDK.
I created a metrics plugin that appears under the 'Add-ons' menu.
what it does:
- counts the number of lines in your project per file
- counts the number of blank lines
- counts the number of comment lines
- counts the number of actual code
- gives you a total lines of code count
- sort by any one of the above metrics in the grid
You can get it
here.
just drop the .sdk in your plug-ins folder where ever you installed BLIde.
Just some feedback after spending some hours with the SDK:
- What are the plans of integrating win forms with the SDK?
reason I ask, is I used visual studio to develop the GUI and then did alot of copying/pasting and modifying to get that custom window in place. While it's not important right now, would be nice to ease the process of integrating forms from a vb project.
That leads me to another point:
- I was able to just add the BLide.exe as a reference to a vb.net project and gain access to the BLIde SDK that way (but I abandoned this idea and stuck with BLIde to give the SDK editor a test run). But I wonder if this way would help speed up the development of complex GUI's with the SDK?
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- GetDocumentList() is a bit slow. I had implemented a progress bar thinking the parsing was what would be slow, but it's the initial building of the doc list that takes a bit. You see this when you press 'calculate'.
- is there a method to get the Editor's file name? I couldn't figure out a way to do this. The first column of the metrics is left blank for this reason. I guess when this becomes available I'll make a public download on the blitzmax forums.
- the 'try catch' doesn't seem to be 'catching' in the main method. I had null reference errors while developing the plugin and I'd get a standard JIT runtime error dialog (with no line numbers, just the stack trace).
- intellisense seems spotty. I had a form with a public member called 'progressbar', but whenever i referenced it as 'myForm.progressBar' i would not get any of the progressbar's properties.
- Is there a way to do multiple sdk files that link together for a single plugin? This plugin was very simple in functionality but as you can see the code is rather long. It'd be great of BLIde supported a 'plugin solution' just like a blitzmax solution, so that more complex SDK's can remain manageable and maintainable. If not, I understand if this is too niche and not worth doing.
- is the SDK going to provide a way for plugins to save their own metadata? or is up to the plugin to do it's own file IO and saving states? This would be useful for plugins that want to save preferences or something.
- in relation to the above point. Wouldn't it be better to save plugins in the application data folder? I may be mistaken, but this might make things a bit more 'vista-proof'. I know vista doesn't allow apps write access to program file folders.
all in all, an awesome first release! very pleased with the results and possibilities.
