Since SDL Trados Studio is a Microsoft .NET application, third-party plug-ins should be developed using Add token content here. The Add token content here comes with a number of Visual Studio project templates which give you a quick start to creating various types of plug-ins.

In this topic, we will be creating a Translation Provider plug-in s an example. We will only focus on the aspects that are common to all types of plug-ins. For more information on building a Translation Provider plug-in specifically.

First of all, make sure that you have followed the Setting up a Developer Machine information.

Start Visual Studio and click New Project. Select one of the SDL Trados Studio project templates that are available. If you don't see any SDL Trados Studio project templates please make sure you have installed the latest SDL Trados Studio SDK version from the developer hub.

The project templates already contains stubs for all the classes you will have to implement to create a new plugin.

First of all open PluginProperties.cs, which is located next to the AssemblyInfo.cs file in the Properties folder. This contains a single Plugin attribute, which is what fundamentally makes this project a plug-in project. "Plugin_Name" is a resource string defined in PluginResources.resx.

[assembly: Sdl.Core.PluginFramework.Plugin("Plugin_Name")]

Open the PluginResources.resx file. You'll see that this contains a string value called "Plugin_Name". This defines the name of the plug-in assembly and will be preset to the name of the Visual Studio project. This is the name that will show up in the SDL Trados Studio plug-in management dialog. Any localizable strings referred to from the plug-in attribute or extension attributes should be defined in PluginResources.resx. This ".resx" file will be compiled into a ".resources" file and will be deployed outside of the plug-in assembly itself, so the host application can access the information within it without having to load the plug-in assembly itself.

Every third-party plug-in has to be deployed using an SDL Plug-in Package (*.sdlplugin). This is an OPC-based file format, essentially a ZIP file, that contains the plug-in assembly, plug-in manifest file and the plug-in resources file. All Visual Studio project templates that come with the Add token content here are configured to automatically create a plug-in package when the project is built. One essential piece of information required in order to do this is the plug-in package manifest, which is defined in the file "pluginpackage.manifest.xml" that was part of the project template.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<PluginPackage xmlns="http://www.sdl.com/Plugins/PluginPackage/1.0">
  <PlugInName>MyTranslationProvider</PlugInName>
  <Version>1.0</Version>
  <Description>MyTranslationProvider</Description>
  <Author></Author>
  <RequiredProduct name="SDLTradosStudio" minversion="9.1" />
  <Include>
    <File>MyAssembly.dll</File>
  </Include>
</PluginPackage>

The plug-in package manifest defines a couple of pieces of essential information:

• PlugInName: the friendly name of the plugin. This can be different to the name of the plug-in defined in PluginResources.resx, because a plug-in package can in theory contain multiple plug-ins.
• Version: the version of the plug-in package. This is important because it will be used to detect updated packages. For more information, see Plug-in deployment.
• Description: description of the plug-in package.
• Author: the name of the plug-in author
• RequiredProduct: this indicates which SDL product this plug-in supports. This must include the minimum version and can optionally include a maximum version.
• Include: a list of additional files to be included into the plugin package.

Now build the project and have a look in the project output folder. notice the following:

• The plug-in assembly, "MyPlugin.dll"
• A "Plugins" folder", which contains:
  • The plug-in manifest, "MyPlugin.plugin.xml", which lists information about all the extension classes. the plug-in contains.
  • The neutral plug-in resources file "MyPlugin.plugin.resources", which contains all the localizable strings and images referred to within the plug-in manifest. This was compiled from "PluginResources.resx".
• The plug-in package, "MyPlugin.sdlplugin" which contains all of the above, together with the plug-in package manifest.

Now, we are ready to deploy the plug-in package in SDL Trados Studio. See Plug-in deployment.