Development environment
Before we can actually start to develop a plug-in, we need to setup our development environment.
Table of Contents
Installing the .NET SDK
To develop import plug-ins, you need a working .NET development environment. At minimum this requires installing a .NET SDK. We recommend to use the most current release of .NET SDK 8.0 (download) as this will be compatible to all PiWeb Auto Importer versions supporting plug-ins.
Some IDEs like Visual Studio may already take care of installing the .NET SDK for you. Visual Studio for example will install the .NET SDK when the workload .NET desktop development is checked during installation.
Installing project templates
After installing the .NET SDK you can use your favorite IDE to develop import plug-ins. To make creating new plugin projects easier, we provide a project template. This template automatically creates the correct filesystem structure including a basic manifest file. It also adds the PiWeb Import SDK NuGet package to the new project for you.
.NET provides command line tooling for installing project templates from NuGet. To install our project template, open a terminal and run dotnet new install Zeiss.PiWeb.Sdk.Import.ProjectTemplates. IDEs supporting this mechanism will now offer a template called PiWeb-Import-Sdk Plugin when creating a new project.
Usage in Visual Studio
Usage in Rider
Rider < 2024.1 does not support entering values for optional parameters for custom project templates.