Can an interface define the signature of a c#-class

Posted by happyclicker on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by happyclicker
Published on 2010-06-09T21:56:36Z Indexed on 2010/06/09 22:02 UTC
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I have a .net-app that provides a mechanism to extend the app with plugins. Each plugin must implement a plugin-interface and must provide furthermore a constructor that receives one parameter (a resource context).

During the instantiation of the plugin-class I look via reflection, if the needed constructor exists and if yes, I instantiate the class (via Reflection). If the constructor does not exists, I throw an exception that says that the plugin not could be created, because the desired constructor is not available.

My question is, if there is a way to declare the signature of a constructor in the plugin-interface so that everyone that implements the plugin-interface must also provide a constructor with the desired signature. This would ease the creation of plugins.

I don’t think that such a possibility exists because I think such a feature falls not in the main purpose for what interfaces were designed for but perhaps someone knows a statement that does this, something like:

public interface IPlugin {
    ctor(IResourceContext resourceContext);
    int AnotherPluginFunction();
}

I want to add that I don't want to change the constructor to be parameterless and then set the resource-context through a property, because this will make the creation of plugins much more complicated. The persons that write plugins are not persons with deep programming experience. The plugins are used to calculate statistical data that will be visualized by the app.

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