BugNET

There are a couple of integration points that could be nice

one would be integration into CrusieControl.net like the one in trac  ( https://oss.werkbold.de/trac-cc )

Another thought of mine is to see if the guys at www.visualsvn.com would be interested in plugging/linking your system with theirs.  Maybe even tie in api to automate some of the hooks.  I think that could get you some really good exposure as well as give them a gorgeous opensource tool to bundle.  Not sure how everyone would feel about that.

What would we need to do to create this integration?

Best practices from what I gather are to load plug-ins/extensions into a separate AppDomain in order to avoid catastrophic crashes and such inside the plug-ins from taking down the host application. I believe this would also make it possible to run the separate AppDomain under a different security context which probably gives more possibilities to prevent a malicious or rouge plug-in from doing reflection type look-ups in order to gain unintended access to the inner parts of the host application.

I think having a way to extend a product like BugNET through plugins or extensions with a well documented API is very valuable to it's success. Bugzilla, has an extension system although I think you have to a Perl developer to develop these extensions (ahck!), and trac has probably even a better and more utilized plug-in infrastructure. By the way, I'm a current Bugzilla user that has been following the BugNET project pretty consistently for a year or so and trying to evaluate when feature sets are just right sot that we can make the switch. As a .NET developer, the idea of being able to modify code within BugNET if necessary is very attractive however a rich extension/plug-in capability would probably even better since I would be able to more easily be able to share the plug-ins instead of trying to fork the project if I wanted to let others use any type of additional functionality that I come up with. For what it's worth, BugNET seems very close to most of the features we would need so I'm not sure if we would really need to make any modifications anyway but it's nice to know we can.

For a good list of frameworks for supporting plugin infrastructures in .NET please see the WikiPedia page on Plug-ins. I know about a year or so ago, Microsoft was endording one of their own plugin infrastructures which was supposed to simplify setting up plugins and such but after doing a breif search I could only come up with an MEF project on codeplex. I'm not sure if this is the same as the original thing I was seeing on Microsoft's own site but it may be a good place to start.