Herbert123 wrote: ↑Fri 21 Jul 2017 22:02
@Photoken: I see you've been playing around a lot!
Would you mind explaining the coding environment setup you have to make this work?
Welcome back, my friend!
The development environment couldn't be more simple -- the free Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition:
https://www.visualstudio.com/
A word of advice: The thing that you download from that page is the small VS2017 installer. When you run the installer, it will connect to MS and download and install VS2017 and all the required supporting files. That download and installation procedure will take a
loooooong time. Hours. I literally started the download & installation, put the Thinkpad aside, cooked dinner, ate dinner, washed the dishes, and then ate dessert. When I came back to the Thinkpad, the installation procedure was at about 90% complete.
VS is a dream to use. If you've never used it, you can go through the various "Getting Started" tutorials. VS can be highly customized, and has some excellent AddIns available to get from within the IDE. You can code in your favorite language and the AddIns and Scripts you create should work. I suspect that AddIns built with the .Net Windows Forms GUI won't work on non-Windows OSes, but non-interactive AddIns and Scripts should be OK anywhere.
To set up VS2017 to create PL stuff, after you create a new VS Solution, in the Solution Explorer panel right-click on the "References" item and choose "Add Reference". In the next dialog window, expand the "COM" item on the left and select "Type Libraries". Scroll down the list and select "PhotoLIne",
place a checkmark in the box next to the item and hit the "OK" button. Now you'll be good to go and have full IntelliSense, code completion and Type Library exploration for the PL functions. Note: when a newer version of PL is released, you'll have to open your solutions that used the older version of PL, delete the old "PhotoLine" reference, and repeat the above procedure to load the newer PL Type Library.
If you get stuck, just give a holler and I'll see what I can advise.
As of now, I've decided that (because I will not code in any language other than C#) instead of writing a "script", I'll write the code and compile it into a DLL. Additionally, I'll create AddIns (to support getting user input from a GUI, and also support localization for various languages) as either compiled executables or compiled DLLs (which I will be trying to learn this weekend).