Time to test your plugins with Rhino 8!

Rhino Developer
2

Hi @curtisw,

thanks for offering your help.

I was trying our plug-in with Rhino 8 and my experiences are the following:

  1. Targeting .NET 4.8: I basically just changed the launch program to Rhino 8 and it generally worked. Have still some issues with an SQLite database I’m using (SQLite error in Rhino 8 with .NET 4.8), the rest seems to work so far.

  2. Targeting .NET 7: I ran the Upgrade assistant you recommended at the dev conference and ran into quite some troubles:

  • Dependent libraries (e.g. Nuget dlls) aren’t copied to the output directory anymore and so the plug-in crashes during startup because of the missing libraries. Using <CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies>true</CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies> in the project file copies the libraries to the output, but now the plug-in doesn’t load anymore at all, I just get the generic “Unable to load plug-in: initialization failed” message from Rhino without any further information. <= this prevents me from using the plug-in with .NET 7 atm.
  • AssemblyInfo.cs will get removed and is then auto-generated during the build. However, I wasn’t able to set the plug-in GUI in the project file, so it was missing in the auto-generated assembly info file and Rhino therefore couldn’t load the plug-in’s panel when registering it like so in the PlugIn derived class, as this.Id is null:
Panels.RegisterPanel(this, panelType, "MyName", MyLogo, PanelType.System);
  • I then switched back to using the old AssemblyInfo.cs and removed the auto-generation, which seems to help. Do you know of a way to set the project GUID in the csproj file?
  • Some references like RhinoWindows were removed during the upgrade for some reason and I had to add them back manually
  • Some minor tweaks seem to be needed like adding <UseWindowsForms>true</UseWindowsForms> to the project file.
  • A Windows-only plug-in like ours uses some Windows-only methods which will all be marked with a warning unless one specifies net7.0-windows as the build target specifically and adds <GenerateAssemblyInfo>true</GenerateAssemblyInfo>
  • The RhinoCommon, RhinoWindows and Grasshopper references have those yellow warning signs stating “Package ‘RhinoCommon 7.29.23107.3001’ was restored using ‘.NETFramework,Version=v4.6.1, .NETFramework,Version=v4.6.2, .NETFramework,Version=v4.7, .NETFramework,Version=v4.7.1, .NETFramework,Version=v4.7.2, .NETFramework,Version=v4.8, .NETFramework,Version=v4.8.1’ instead of the project target framework ‘net7.0-windows’. This package may not be fully compatible with your project.” Not sure if this is an issue or not.