How to ease the pain of writing a PDMWorks Enterprise addin

Writing and debugging VB .NET addins for PDMWorks Enterprise is not a fun task. First you cannot step through your code and watch your variables update so finding the problem is a lot like finding a needle in a haystack… additionally, between the builds you need to constantly unload the addin, start/stop the explorer.exe process, compile the .dll, then reload the addin.

-Too much work for me. I typically write a majority of the code as a “Windows Application” then after I get that working I’ll convert the application into a “Class Library” (in the project’s properties screen). Granted there is a little cleanup to this step but I think that pales in comparison to writing the code as a class library from the beginning.