I think I've mentioned this was coming in a few threads, so I figured I consolidate updates to a single post here.
Inkscape Extensions in Any Language Tutorial: http://sugarpillstudios.com/wp/?p=142
Please let me know what you think, either by commenting on the blog or replying here. Enjoy!

OMG, that is awesome!
I probably am not qualified to comment, since I know very little about coding. But I suspect I can learn a lot from this, and look forward to studying it!

LiquidAsh wrote:I think I've mentioned this was coming in a few threads, so I figured I consolidate updates to a single post here.
Inkscape Extensions in Any Language Tutorial: http://sugarpillstudios.com/wp/?p=142
Please let me know what you think, either by commenting on the blog or replying here. Enjoy!

One thing to keep in mind IMHO when advertising extension development based on custom binaries: potential loss of cross-platform support.

Inkscape is (and hopefully stays) a cross-platform application, and most of the script extensions - usually python-based, some examples are using Perl, or even Ruby - work out-of-the-box on all platforms (including Windows) [1]. Distributing a new extension written in C# as Windows *.exe binary will limit its use cases. Purely python-based extensions written with care work on Linux, OS X and Windows equally well without additional requirements.

[1] Yes, I'm aware that Inkscape still ships with a couple of (input & output) extensions that depend on a shell script interpreter to run an external command - those don't work in the Windows port of Inkscape (no Bourne shell or bash on Windows). Some of them have already been migrated to a python-based execution (based on run_command.py, used e.g. in fig2dev-ext.py, ps2pdf-ext.py, uniconv-ext.py as extension helper module, or uniconv_output.py)

@brynn: thanks for the enthusiasm and be sure to let me know if there's anything I can help clarify.

@~suv: great point. I've been developing in-house tools so this hasn't been an issue for me. If anyone is interested in writing cross platform C# extensions, maybe they can write a follow-up to this tutorial (or maybe I will some day). Mono-project.com has cross platform C# and .Net compilers/libraries so I believe it shouldn't be too difficult to modify the python script that I used to select and run a binary appropriate for each environment(?). Not as elegant as having a single script, but I think it should be possible.

Thanks for the feedback.