How to Distribute .NET Plugins in Rhino 8 Across Multiple Platforms

Rhino Developer
,
1

With Rhino 8, we can now compile our .NET plugins for .NET 4.7, .NET Core 7, and .NET Core 8. Do you have a guide or recommendation on how we could distribute them? My goal is to create a single installer that works seamlessly for all three versions, without requiring any additional setup from the user. Is this achievable? Thank you very much in advance!
Rafa

2 Likes
2

Rafael,

Not sure, but maybe this post will help you.

– Jason

3

hey Rafa – it is indeed possible, given that for my plugin I have a single rhp each for windows & macos (along w/native lib & dotnet wrapper dlls for render sdk & core), which supports rhino 6/7/8, on x64 for windows, and x86_64/arm64 universal for macos; the plugin works regardless which rhino tries to load it, whether it was started with /netfx or not, running under rosetta on macos or not

technically, the major points are that I target a v6 rhinocommon, restrict myself to dotnet apis that are common to v4.7.2 and .net 7, and use reflection in cases where I want to use something added in rhinocommon v7 or v8, or where I cannot avoid using something from .net 7 (e.g. the roslyn compiler)

to make this a bit more concrete, here are the first parts of my csproj files:

windows 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project ToolsVersion="12.0" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\$(MSBuildToolsVersion)\Microsoft.Common.props" Condition="Exists('$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\$(MSBuildToolsVersion)\Microsoft.Common.props')" />
  <PropertyGroup>
    <ProjectGuid>{<removed>}</ProjectGuid>
    <OutputType>Library</OutputType>
    <AppDesignerFolder>Properties</AppDesignerFolder>
    <RootNamespace>bella_rhino</RootNamespace>
    <AssemblyName>bella_rhino</AssemblyName>
    <TargetFrameworkVersion>v4.7.2</TargetFrameworkVersion>
    <FileAlignment>512</FileAlignment>
    <TargetFrameworkProfile />
    <AllowUnsafeBlocks>true</AllowUnsafeBlocks>
    <RunPostBuildEvent>Always</RunPostBuildEvent>
    <Prefer32Bit>false</Prefer32Bit>
    <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport>
    <PlatformTarget>x64</PlatformTarget>
  </PropertyGroup>
  ...
macos 
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Project DefaultTargets="Build" ToolsVersion="4.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <ProjectGuid>{<removed>}</ProjectGuid>
    <OutputType>Library</OutputType>
    <RootNamespace>bella_rhino</RootNamespace>
    <AssemblyName>bella_rhino</AssemblyName>
    <TargetFrameworkVersion>v4.7.2</TargetFrameworkVersion>
    <TargetFrameworkProfile />
    <AllowUnsafeBlocks>true</AllowUnsafeBlocks>
    <RunPostBuildEvent>Always</RunPostBuildEvent>
    <Prefer32Bit>false</Prefer32Bit>
    <ErrorReport>prompt</ErrorReport>
    <!-- important: mac rhino 8 will not load if this is x64 -->
    <PlatformTarget>AnyCPU</PlatformTarget>
  </PropertyGroup>
  ...

I never use the project editor, I always just edit csproj manually, so that some visual studio update doesn’t decide to give me trouble; it may be possible to get this all working using “sdk” style csproj files but I did not immediately have luck with that, and there is no payoff, so did not waste time with it

so anyway this is one way – I hope it helps

1 Like
4

@rafadelmolino,

If you haven’t already, I recommend taking a look at the updated Rhino 8 project templates for Visual Studio from McNeel (https://github.com/mcneel/RhinoVisualStudioExtensions). They multi-target and include a yak packaging step. Yak will install all of framework versions included in the package.