Flexible reporting system with dynamically loaded assemblies

Answer 1

You can consider MEF from Microsoft. It is a composition engine that can be set up to monitor a local folder and automatically load assemblies that export parts (implementation of IReport in your case) that you're interested in. We do have a system like that we implemented sometime ago. We have a single assembly with reports that we load into a separate application domain and reload if the file version has changed. Then we use .NET remoting to communicate between app domains. We considered using Add-in framework from Microsoft but we found it to be very complex and imposing and decided it was too heavy and complex in our case.

Answer 2

Have a look at Mono.Addins (it's MIT license so it's ok with closed software). From your description it does what you need. Basically it uses a dependency tree + plugins based on interfaces. It has it's own manager for loaded .dll-s and its objects are based on the loaded interface, so you don't need any more magic casting to call anything.

Answer 3

This developer fusion article gives you all the code you need to use plug-ins

http://www.developerfusion.com/article/4371/writing-pluginbased-applications/

It's based on reflection.

Answer 4

See this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/835551/problem-with-dynamic-loading-of-a-dll-into-my-program Is doing exactly what you want wihtout all the YAGNI around it.