So I want to get some tips from other devs about how you go about setting up your plugin projects for AC9. I have tried creating them as their own projects within the same solution as AbleCommerce itself, and it tends to work for a time, but eventually something always breaks in Visual Studio. The intellisense will stop working correctly. It will say that I am missing references to things that are definitely included in the project, it will say I'm using features that require a language version above C#2 even though the project's set to use the latest language version (which is the default anyway). Any advice will be very much appreciated. I have had to scrap and start over with clean installs multiple times over the years and I'm just at my wits end with this right now. Walk me through how you create a plugin so that Visual Studio intellisense will work and not report a bunch of nonsense errors that don't actually exist, please, I am begging you!

I did that, but thank you. That is how I started years ago and it has led to the problems I described in my initial post. At this point I have decided to simply abandon trying to use your plugin system and port my own from AbleCommerce Gold which has worked just fine for us for years. I had wanted to try to make the plugins separate projects with the own internal MVC structures using your new system and designs, but that has led to nothing but problems and frequent breakage of Visual Studio's intellisense and language features. I'm done trying to make it work "the right way" and have decided to just go with what actually works. Maybe I can finally get us ported over from Gold to 9 this year. So now my plugin projects contain only the Nhibernate model definitions and SQL scripts (and some supporting code related to my custom plugin system for installing and registering them with the container), and all the MVC parts are being developed directly within the AbleCommerce project instead of in their respective plugin projects. Obviously this means that my plugins cannot be distributed to others since they are directly incorporated into the AbleCommerce project and not installable via AC9's Plugin system (not that I had ever really intended to distribute them in the first place, but the possibility was tempting to take advantage of...oh well).

Please tell me that you do not have another new version of AbleCommerce coming any time soon. I would hate to finally get us ported from Gold to AC9 only to have to immediately turn around and port us to AC10 (or whatever you decide to call it). I know AC9 has been out for quite a long time now and is built on the last .NET Framework version, so please let me know if you have something in the works that uses .NET Core, .NET 8.0, 9.0 or what have you. I don't personally see any reason to move from .NET Framework 4.8 since it has indefinite long-term support, but you all might have different ideas. I just want to know what I'm looking ahead to on my end.

Great, glad to hear that you plan to continue supporting AC9 for at least a few more years. If you want to inquire with the dev team about the plugin issue feel free, I'm sure others would benefit even though I've decided to work around it.