Plugins are the common way for extending applications. They are usually implemented as DLLs. The host application locates the plugins (either by looking in a predefined folder, or by some sort of registry setting or configuration file) then loads them one by one with LoadLibrary. The plugins are then integrated into the host application and extend it with new functionality.
This article will show how to create a host EXE with multiple plugin DLLs. We’ll see how to seamlessly expose any of the host’s classes, functions and data as an API to the plugins. There will be some technical challenges that we are going to solve along the way.
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