Meshula Labs Shell, ©2003 Nick Porcino

The Meshula Labs shell is a simple shell system incorporating a plug in system. The plug in system is designed to solve a few common problems:

1. Discover and register plugins found in a Plugins folder in the same folder as the EXE
2. Provide a simple, universal mechanism whereby changes in APIs do not require the DLLs to be recompiled.
3. Provide a simple interface that makes it trivial to interface the plugins to a scripting language

The discovery of plugins is managed by the fine FindFile class from the article "FindFile class for Windows projects" by Louka Dlagnekov at http://www.codeproject.com/file/Win32FindFile.asp. I referred to Kurt Miller's article on Flipcode, "Creating And Using DLLs" at http://www.flipcode.com/tutorials/tut_dll01.shtml.

When plugins are discovered, they are initialized, and registered by the MLPlug system. The MLPlug system is used to do dispatch to individual plugs, and to set and get parameters on the plugs.

The Meshula Labs Shell is released under the MIT License, cf: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php

Download 45k, v1.0, May 12, 2003