New developer guidance - GUI add-on or plugin

[tree28]

Hello,
I’m new to developing for Archicad and come from a c# background. I am looking for general guidance or advice about developing my first plugin / extension with a GUI interface.

My questions are:

1. Are there any XMAL methodologies for creating a GUI addon or plugin - for example do people use the XAML tools provided by UWP methodologies or are other methodologies better?

2. Before I begin my work are there methodologies useful for developing cross platform (Mac / Windows) addons or plugins that I should know about or consider leveraging?

3. I’m assuming that it’s still best to use Visual Studio but if there are other IDE that people recommend please feel free to mention them.

Appreciate all thoughts and recommendations - thanks in advance.

Sincerely,

[Karl Ottenstein]

Welcome.  Your questions are a little premature.... as they are answered in the basic intro to the API dev kit and will be further answered by exploring all (or at least a lot) of the example add-ons included in the kit download.  All cross-platform information is there, although you'll have questions once you have compiled some of the examples on both platforms and explored things.   Have you signed up for the developer web site yet?

https://archicadapi.graphisoft.com

You can also browse this forum, and search this forum for C# to see that C# is not really an option (certainly for cross-platform, obviously, as it is not an option in XCode when you create the Mac versions).

PS. I should add that UI development for add-ons is platform independent, but uses an ancient Graphisoft text based methodology.  You'll see that the same code will compile, including the UI, for bother platforms - although via Visual Studio for Windows and XCode for Mac. Some here, years ago, have posted ways of converting a graphic sketch to that UI file format, but the simple answer is that there is no visual UI designer as in any modern development environment.