Troubleshooting UI Plugins

Registered plugins are referenced by the class ID in the xml configuration file. If STK cannot load the plugin, STK will display the error in the Message Viewer window. Usually the error simply says: “Class not found”. Here is a list of the possible issues and solutions:

XML file missing/incorrect

If you open the STK Desktop Application, check the Message Viewer window, and if you do not see a message that STK tried to load your plugin, it means that there is an issue with the plugin manifest file. The manifest file needs to be a valid XML file and point to your plugin.

The plugin is not COM visible

Under project properties, on the Application tab, click the Assembly Information… button and make sure the Make assembly COM-Visible check box is checked.

Under project properties, on the Build tab, make sure that the Register for COM interop check box is checked.

According to the Visual Studio documentation, this option is not necessary to run the project outside Visual Studio, but we recommend it.

The plugin was not built with the right permissions

Your account does not have the administrator privileges on your computer. To build the plugin, you need to open Visual Studio under the administrator account. Even when you build the plugin without administrator rights and register the DLL under the administrator account, the plugin will not run in STK.

The plugin was not registered (on the user computer)

There are several ways to deploy the UI plugin:

Visual studio installer project

To install the plugin, you need to the add the primary output from your UI Plugin project to the installer project. The default setting for registering the output is vsdrpCOM (which is the correct setting and should not be modified).

Manually by coping the content of the Bin directory to the user computer and manually registering the plugin using the command prompt.

Make sure the command prompt is open under user account with administrator privileges.
For C#/VB.net plugins, run regasm command located in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\ directory with following syntax: regasm /codebase YOUR_UIPLUGINNAME.dll.

.net Runtime mismatch (STK 10.1.3 and lower)

Before STK 11, STK ran under .net runtime 2.0, so it accepted only the plugins built using .net Framework 3.5 or lower. Starting with STK 11 and Visual Studio 2010, the default framework was set to .net Framework 4.0 or higher.