Uno Applications with Plugin support.

[insomniachi]

I followed the microsoft guide of making plugin based application, which you can see here.

In plugin projects i'll add
<EnableDynamicLoading>true</EnableDynamicLoading>

When i publish a plugin project. i only expect 1 dll if it's a simple plugin without any nuget references. otherwise, it should only include
the projects dll and it's nuget references and dependencies.

To remove dlls from project references i'll add the below to all the project references.

<ItemGroup>
    <ProjectReference Include="..\PluginBase\PluginBase.csproj">
        <Private>false</Private>
        <ExcludeAssets>runtime</ExcludeAssets>
    </ProjectReference>
</ItemGroup>

The only dlls remaining the the publish directory are now the Uno.* ones. (It's not needed with plugins as they'll be part of the main application and it'll be a waste of space to include them.)
I also go this issue, which got resolved after removing the excess dlls manually

[jeromelaban]

Thanks for the report.

I'm not seeing the behavior that you're describing, there are no dlls in the output for a library project. Could you create a repro solution which demonstrates the issue?

[insomniachi]

in this project
i just created a new Uno Library project UnoLibrary1,

building that for the winappsdk target gives some some extra dlls

building for net9.0-desktop produces the expected dlls.

but if you include the true in the csproj file as mentioned in the msdocs
you get a lot more dlls

if i don't set EnableDynamicLoading it won't copy the nuget references to the output

[jeromelaban]

Thanks. At this time, there's no support in uno for this specific property and it is expected, based on the description of this property, that all the dependencies are included in the output (uno included).

How do you plan on distributing your plugins to your app?

[insomniachi]

similar to how jellyfin does it.
i'll have a json file that points to all the plugins which are zip files. (https://repo.jellyfin.org/files/plugin/manifest.json)
main application will have UI to download these.

[jeromelaban]

Thanks.

Most libraries in the ecosystem won't handle this property properly and you'll have to package your plugin manually for now, by adding the right assemblies in your final package.

Note that EnableDynamicLoading is mostly there to pull all the dependencies of a project into the build output path, just in case they would not be present in a host app. In the case of larger platforms like Uno, the .NET SDK can't know in advance what's going to be available in the host app, particularly if there's already dependencies pulling the binaries that your plugin depends on.

If your plugin does not have any dependency (except uno itself), you can package it as-is without EnableDynamicLoading and try to load. If there are other dependencies, you'll have to copy files manually.