Project is here only as a reference, and is abandoned.

LightShell is a simple shell that let's you create GUI application by focusing only on your business, not on technical details of plugin system or dependency resolution.

To create empty application powered by LightShell simply create empty WPF application called SampleApp targeting .NET 4.5.2, then install LightShell package from NuGet:

Install-Package LightShell

Once you run your project you will see empty application window.

To create your first LightShell Plugin create empty WPF User Control Library project called MyFirstPlugin and install into it LightShell Plugin API package:

Install-Package LightShell.PluginApi

ℹ️ Make sure you add reference to MyFirstPlugin in SampleApp project to be sure that always most recent version of plugin is copied to LightShell plugin system search dir. Otherwise you will have to manually copy plugin DLL to SampleApp output directory.

⚠️ If you add some custom assemblies to your plugin project, they won't automatically be copied to SampleApp output, so please reference them as well in SampleApp project.

All we have to do is to create new class called MyPluginDefinition and do two things:

• Make it implement interface ILightShellPlugin available in namespace LightShell.Api.Plugins
• Export it using MEF attribute: [Export(typeof(ILightShellPlugin))] (to do that you will need to reference .NET assembly: System.ComponentModel.Composition, so we start with definition as follows:

   [Export(typeof(ILightShellPlugin))]
   public class MyPlugin : ILightShellPlugin
   {
      public string PluginName
      {
         get
         {
            return "MyPlugin";
         }
      }

      public IEnumerable<MenuEntryDescriptor> GetMenuEntries()
      {
         yield break;
      }

      public IEnumerable<IMicroservice> GetMicroservices()
      {
         yield break;
      }
   }