When starting a new plugin project with Visual Studio, developers usually take one of three approaches:

1. Start a project from scratch using a standard type and customize.
2. Copy an earlier/sample plugin project and modify.
3. Use a wizard to setup include, linking, configuration, build settings and skeleton code.

The first two approaches are time-consuming and error-prone. #3 is certainly the better approach, but may only be worth your time if you will be producing a large number of plugins. If your application has a large enough community, there’s a good chance that a custom wizard is already available somewhere.

After getting tired of manually configuring Visual Studio Projects for every random plugin idea we’ve tried, I adapted the standard MFC DLL wizard to produce a Fusion 5 template. Microsoft’s Javascript-based wizard engine is definitely not the clearest collection of code that I’ve wandered through, but a little time invested here can save you repetitive overhead for every future project.

For the search-and-modify types, customizing the wizard to your development environment should be fairly painless. Most of what you need to change will be in the templates/1033/root.vcproj file. You can also modify the project settings manually after creating the skeleton code, but that does partly defeat the purpose of the template. This project wizard is designed to work with the Fusion 5.3 SDK and will set up includes, linking, win32/x64 platforms, post-build copying into your plugins folder and a flashy tile icon.

The Visual Studio “Custom Wizard” template can also be used to make wizard screens if you need to customize parameters on a project-by-project basis. Get in touch with us if you’re compiling with VS 2003 and we can dig up the older project wizard. If you find the wizard useful, feedback is always appreciated!