Working with a plugin architecture (binary references)

[Dan Dorey]

I'm in the midst of creating a plugin framework with the goal of making
it as easy as possible for myself and other developers to both create
new plugins and work with existing ones.

Each plugin has a seperate sub-dir for each plugin with all external
dependencies located in this directory. When I load these plugins
dynamically everything appears to work properly.

So now let's pretend that I'm developing down the road and I'm creating
a component that relies on one or more of these plugins. I think
ideally I'd just like to make a binary reference to the DLL in the
plugin that contains the classes I need. Since the plugin directories
contain all their external dependencies I've set the "Copy Local"
option to false. However when I do this I get DLL missing errors at run
time:

"
[Could not load file or assembly 'prairieFyre.Interfaces,
Version=5.0.50928.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c70c681b5e8152b2'
or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.]
:
at prairieFyre.IQDrivers.DriverMiTAI.ProcessCallEvent (CallEvent
callEvent)
at prairieFyre.IQDrivers.DriverMiTAI.OnMiTAIEvent(Str ing mitaiEvent)
(DriverMiTAI - OnMiTAIEvent)
"

I don't have these problems if I'm loading this plugin at runtime. If I
copy prairieFyre.Interfaces to the /bin/debug directory everything
works fine in the above scenario.

My Plugins are located in /bin/debug/Plugins/<plugin-dirand I have
the following app.config for probing:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
<runtime>
<assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
<probing privatePath="bin"/>
</assemblyBinding>
</runtime>
</configuration>

Any thoughts on what's going on? Or if someone has an entirely
different approach to what I'm trying to do, I'm open to suggestions!

Thanks,
Dan