Developing plugins for Hotkeycontrol

Prerequisites:

To develop plugins for Hotkeycontrol 5, you will need

1) Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Software Development Kit (x86) – required

2) Visual studio 2005 (any edition/any language) – optional but recommended

You will also need to have atleast an average development experience using .Net framework (Visual C# or Visual basic)

Introduction:

Developing a plugin is as simple as implementing all the methods in IHCtrl interface - which will be called at each stage of Hotkeycontrol's lifecycle.

Order in which Hotkeycontrol calls these methods:

When hotkeycontrol starts monitoring:

1) Load - initalize plugin variables

When hotkey corresponding to the plugin is pressed:

2) Display - return what should be displayed in OSD

3) Run - perform actual action

When hotkeycontrol exits monitoring mode(for displaying configuration window):

4) Unload - clear plugin variables and cleaning shutdown processes

During configuration mode - when Configure button is pressed for this plugin:

5) ConfigPlugin - show a modal window with all plugin options

For more information please refer these resources:

1) Plugin.chm - IHCtrl.dll assembly documentation

2) Screenshot.zip – Sample code of Screenshot plugin