I’m looking for people to help me test .Net Support for ObjectDock.

What you will have to do is simply try to build a docklet using the sdk and send me suggestions & bug reports (or not, if you feel evil :)). The more of the SDK you use, the better, of course, but building a simple docklet will work too.

Here is an explanation of the way I build it and how it works:

Last week, I started working on a way to build ObjectDock docklets in C#. Currently ObjectDock only allows you to build docklet using C/C++. As I have no access to ObjectDock internals, the only way to have docklets using managed code is to build a “proxy” docklet and call into managed code using COM.

The following picture shows the interaction between the different parts. When building a .Net Docklet, the only thing you have to care about is the docklet code itself (the Interop & helper dll are supplied and do not need to be modified).

The API is similar to the native SDK API. Each .Net Docklet has to implement the IDockletInterface interface (basically, the exportable functions from the native API). The native SDK functions are provided through the docklet class found in the DotNetSDK dll (the docklet handle & private data are encapsulated, so it’s somewhat cleaner than the native API).

The interop docklet can be used in two different way: in standalone mode or in multi-docklet mode. In standalone mode, the programmer distributes the interop & helper dlls along with it’s .Net docklet and set the interop to autoload it’s plugin. It’s completely transparent to the user. In multi-docklet mode, you only distribute the .net docklet part (users should have the “runtime”) and users could choose from a selection of docklets the one to load.

If you want to help me test it, drop me a mail.

Merry Christmas everybody 🙂