Load And Unload Package Downloaded

[chuongmep]

What improvement/feature would you like to see in Dynamo?

It would be great if we had this, for example I have downloaded a lot of packages, sometimes I don't want to use it for performance gain or bugs, but sometimes I want to turn them back on without having to uninstall or install anything.

How would you see this improvement/feature working?

The benefits of this include :

• Performance: I'm sure this will improve when too many packages are loaded that are not needed.
• Fast error detection: it's very easy to quickly check for conflicts of a package. We just need to turn them off and on one by one to check.

[mjkkirschner]

We've actually done a lot of work and iteration to support some packages being unloaded without being uninstalled. It's not generally available, but I agree it will be useful.

Unfortunately, because we can't unload assemblies from the current appdomain - it results in a lot of very sticky and confusing ux issues. We hope to investigate the new features of .net core/5 for assembly isolation and unloading since packages are essentially plugins - but this will depend on other host products and the whole ecosystem moving forward with their hosted .net runtimes.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/tutorials/creating-app-with-plugin-support

[chuongmep]

Is there a roadmap or anything where I can track this when the ecosystem is updated to .net core?

[Amoursol]

Hello @chuongmep - We have a Dynamo Public Roadmap available here https://github.com/DynamoDS/Dynamo/wiki/Dynamo-Public-Roadmap (Which I have plans to update soon!), which typically covers the larger experiences being worked upon. The .NET core update wouldn't probably make this list Roadmap as it's more of a thematic narrative rather than technical rundown.

Would it be useful to you to see some of these explorations also added to the Roadmap link above? Typically, this gets updated every ~6 months, and I'm lagging a little as we've been furiously working through the Visual Refresh work.

[Amoursol]

@chuongmep we are currently working through an upgrade to .NET 8 that would allow Dynamic Loading/Unloading of Assemblies, so this isn't technically possible until that work is complete. The work is actively underway right now, so we should be able to spike on this soon.

[chuongmep]

@Amoursol this really a good new with me today, resolved many issues I can't continue in many years