Vixen won't recognize my DLL

[CRWsound]

Hello all,

Thanks in advance for the help I'm betting someone will be able to give me - I've read a lot of the posts here and it's a great, helpful forum.

To my question. I'm not new to programming, but I'm new to C# and to Vixen. I can't get Vixen to recognize any DLL's that I'm making. I'm using Visual Studio Express 2010, and I have Vixen version 2.1.4.0

At first I was trying to make my own DLL, but then I switched to just trying to compile known good code, that won't work either. For instance: I downloaded Mike Heuer's code for the KMtronic-8Channel interface from this post,
http://doityourselfchristmas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13036
opened his .cs in Visual Studio C#, added the reference to the Vixen .exe where I'm using it (program files) and added the reference to system.windows.forms because it wouldn't compile without it. After that, it compiled to a dll fine. I dropped the dll in the output plugins folder for my Vixen install, and Vixen doesn't see it. I tried registering the dll with regsvr32 which didn't work at all, and also with regasm, which did work. Vixen wouldn't see it.

I tried compiling the vbpluginskeleton_134 code that teberle supplied in this post,
http://doityourselfchristmas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1597
that one I couldn't get to compile without errors, but it did compile down to a dll that again, Vixen won't see.

I tried following the directions in the "howtodriver.pdf" doc that Tony wrote and made available in this post,
http://www.doityourselfchristmas.com/forums/showthread.php?t=6798&page=2
and made a basic skeletal dll using C# that compiled without errors. I didn't add any code to it other than what the doc had in it for getting started. Again, Vixen won't see that dll.

So. I'm sure it's just some stupid little oversight that I'm making, and I could probably figure it out if I just fought with this single problem for the next two days, but I'm hoping to solve it a little quicker than that and get to work outside. Is there something obvious that I'm overlooking?

Oh, I'm on WinXP pro with service pack 3, always using admin privilege, and Vixen works fine except for this problem. If I drop other plugin dll's that I downloaded from vixen.com into the output plugins folder, it sees them just fine. It only hates the ones I'm making.

Thanks again,
Chris

[mheuer]

Hi, Welcome to DIYC!

I'm not too experienced with C#, or VisualStudio (I use C often though),

But I was curious about this and tried to compile my code with a Recent Visual Studio 2010 Express install, and found the same problem (I previously compiled using Sharp Develop 3, a GPL'd C# IDE).

At first Vixen wouldn't see it, but when I changed the 'Target Framework' project property away from .NET 4.0, to 3.5, it was then recognized in Vixen once again.
Maybe Vixen has trouble loading plug-ins targeted for .NET 4.0 possibly?

Hope that helps,
Mike.

[CRWsound]

Hey Mike, thanks for the response.

A-a-a-a-n-d...totally worked! That's exactly the kind of thing I was thinking it would be: something completely simple that I wouldn't think of for far too long - thanks for the insight.

BTW, I did try Sharp Develop with the "how to" that Tony wrote for it. Of course I'm using the latest version of Sharp, and when I tried to compile it, it threw so many errors (and didn't compile to a dll) that I gave up. At least I'm familiar with the Visual Studio suite so I figured I'd stay with that until reaching the point of last resort.

Thanks again, I'm (hopefully) in business! As they say, now it's only a SMOP.

Cheers,
Chris