Plugin Development Overview

Welcome to the BetterLyrics development community! This guide will help you get started with plugin development quickly.

We provide a highly automated build system based on the “Code-First” philosophy—code is the Single Source of Truth. We delegate tedious tasks to automated tools: from automatically avoiding dependency conflicts (DLL Hell) to solving Native AOT trimming challenges, and even auto-generating multi-language resources. No manual handling is required by the developer.

Build Process Overview

To ensure maximum performance and stability of plugins in a Native AOT environment, we have customized an MSBuild pipeline:

Smart Exclusion

The build script automatically compares dependencies against the Host App’s existing libraries (such as BetterLyrics.Core or system libraries). Once duplicates are detected, redundant DLLs are automatically excluded from the output. This reduces file size and eliminates version conflicts.

Source-First Localization

DevTools directly scans your Config definition classes and automatically generates or synchronizes JSON language files within your source directory, making multi-language support practically “zero-cost.”

Automatic Anti-Trim Injection

The tools automatically analyze reflection calls in your code, generating TrimmerRoots.xml and Config code, which are then injected into the host project’s PluginConfigs directory. This ensures your plugin code “survives” the aggressive Native AOT trimming mode without polluting the final plugin package.

Build Process Diagram

graph TD
    subgraph BuildPipeline [Build Pipeline]
    A[Compile Plugin] --> B{Dependency Check}
    B -->|Host Has It| C[Exclude DLL]
    B -->|Private Dep| D[Keep DLL]
    
    A --> E{Run DevTools}
    E -->|Scan Config| F["Sync Langs/*.json in Source"]
    E -->|Analyze Reflection| G[Generate Trimmer Config]
    
    F --> H["Output to Bin"]
    G --> I["Inject into Host (PluginConfigs)"]
    end
    
    H --> J["Pack Artifact (.blp)"]
    I -.->|Exclude| J