Creating a Plugin

Creating a OBS .NET Plugin is a simple and straightforward process that can be accomplished in a matter of minutes. All languages based on Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (.NET) should be fine. This includes C#, C++/cli, Visual Basic and others.

Prerequisites

This tutorial will assume you have some knowledge of .NET languages (I will use C# in my examples) and how to configure various dependencies in the Visual Studio Environment.

If you haven’t already, you must download and install the CLR Host Plugin before continuing on with this tutorial.

Creating a project

Regardless of the language you choose, the project type will always be Class Library .

Let’s create the Project by File→New Project…→Visual C#→Class Library and name it MyImagePlugin .

In the references you will want to add CLRHost.Interop.dll .

Creating the Plugin class

There are currently two ways of creating a OBS Plugin class:

• Implementing the Plugin interface
• Extending the AbstractPlugin class

If you want finer grained control over the class then you may freely choose implementing the Plugin interface. For the sake of brevity we will be using the AbstractPlugin class.

Rename the default Class file generated when you created the project to MyImagePlugin.cs .

Open MyImagePlugin.cs and it should look like this:

using
 System
;

using
 System.Collections.Generic
;

using
 System.Linq
;

using
 System.Text
;

using
 System.Threading.Tasks
;


namespace
 MyImagePlugin

{

    public
 class
 MyImagePlugin

    {

    }

}

The first thing we want to do is include the CLROBS namespace that all interfaces and classes the CLRHost.Interop belong to.

The using statements should now look like this:

using
 CLROBS
;

using
 System
;

using
 System.Collections.Generic
;

using
 System.Linq
;

using
 System.Text
;

using
 System.Threading.Tasks
;

Then we need to extend the AbstractPlugin class so that when the library is loaded by the CLR Host Plugin it will recognize and register the plugin correctly.

using
 CLROBS
;

using
 System
;

using
 System.Collections.Generic
;

using
 System.Linq
;

using
 System.Text
;

using
 System.Threading.Tasks
;


namespace
 MyImagePlugin

{

    public
 class
 MyImagePlugin
 :
 AbstractPlugin

    {

    }

}

At this point we actually have a completely valid and functional plugin. Let’s try building and copying the MyImagePlugin.dll to the CLRHostPlugin directory that was created when you installed the CLRHostPlugin.

Unfortunately, it appears nothing changed! We haven’t actually added any features for OBS to display so the only thing to indicate success at this point is if we look in the log.

You should see something like this:

16:33:38: CLRHost::LoadPlugins() attempting to load the plugin assembly MyImagePlugin
16:33:38: CLRHost::LoadPlugins() successfully added CLR plugin [Type: MyImagePlugin.MyImagePlugin, Name: Default Plugin Name]

Well… Default Plugin Name doesn’t look very good. Let’s change this by overriding the default plugin name in the constructor of MyImagePlugin .

public
 class
 MyImagePlugin
 :
 AbstractPlugin

{

    public
 MyImagePlugin
()

    {

        Name
 =
 "Sample Image Plugin"
;

    }

}

Build, copy and running again shows us this in the log:

16:41:05: CLRHost::LoadPlugins() attempting to load the plugin assembly MyImagePlugin
16:41:05: CLRHost::LoadPlugins() successfully added CLR plugin [Type: MyImagePlugin.MyImagePlugin, Name: Sample Image Plugin]