As mentioned in my previous article, the Managed AddIn Framework supports AppDomain isolation out of the box. This can come in very handy as long as you understand what is really happening under the covers. I am not going to cover all the details of AppDomain isolation and assembly loading within the CLR, but there are plenty of great resources about such things on MSDN. All you need to know for this article is that every .NET assembly much be loaded into memory within an AppDomain, and unless you specifically share assemblies across these domains (as explained below) then they will be loaded into memory for every AppDomain you create. This is particularly important for WPF AddIns, because the WPF assemblies consume a rather generous portion of memory, and since your AddIns are each loaded into their own AppDomain, this means that the WPF assemblies must also be loaded into...

Disclaimer: This post is mainly for my own reference. Quite honestly, the Managed AddIn Framework (henceforth known as MAF), is a rather complex beast, and I simply cannot remember all the steps necessary to utilize it properly without a small reference guide. This post will cover the complete step-by-step tutorial of every action that a developer must perform to utilize the AddIn framework. It will not be a complete overview of what MAF is or how all the parts tie together. I will do my best to cover these things, but I have also included some very helpful reference material that will cover these topics better than I ever could. Before continuing This post does not cover all the intricacies and overall design of the Managed AddIn framework. While it will in fact walk you through a step-by-step creation of a WPF app that supports AddIns, it will...

Just what exactly are these snippets? I believe that snippets are an underused feature built into Visual Studio. This post is my attempt at comparing the two tools I have used for snippet creation, and hoping to make more developers out there aware of just how easy they are to create and use in your existing projects. I am by no means an expert with either of these tools, but I think that is the point: they take a few minutes to create and can be reused for immediate time savers. Much to my surprise there exists a significant number of .NET developers that are not taking advantage of code snippets, built-in or otherwise. No doubt you have all seen them in intellisense before: they appear with a partially-jagged piece of paper as seen below. When selected, they expand into a template of code that has select editable variables. A number of...