Upgrading from v0.2.2 to v0.2.3 — Developer Guide

This page is for developers who build SharwAPI plugins, covering new capabilities available in v0.2.3.

v0.2.3 introduces no breaking changes to plugin code. All existing plugins compile and load without any modifications.

Summary of Changes

Type	Description
New plugin format	Directory format: place the publish/ output folder directly in plugins/
New plugin format	.sharw format: bundle the plugin into a single ZIP archive

Required Actions

Existing plugins continue to work without any changes.

New Capabilities (Optional)

During development: use the folder format for rapid iteration

During development and debugging, copy the dotnet publish output directory directly into plugins/ — no packaging step needed:

dotnet publish -c Debug -p:CopyLocalLockFileAssemblies=true
# Copy bin/Debug/net10.0/publish/ to plugins/MyPlugin/ in the host directory

For distribution: use the .sharw format

For plugins that carry third-party dependencies — especially cross-platform native binaries — the .sharw format is the recommended distribution method.

Add the following MSBuild target to your .csproj to generate a .sharw package automatically on every dotnet publish:

<Target Name="CreateSharwPackage" AfterTargets="Publish">
  <ZipDirectory
    SourceDirectory="$(PublishDir)"
    DestinationFile="$(OutDir)$(AssemblyName).sharw"
    Overwrite="true" />
</Target>

For full details, see .sharw Plugin Package.