When writing a plugin for vvvv the developer needs to at least add a reference to the VVVV.PluginInterfaces assembly. In order to do so there've been two choices up till now:

1. Reference the assembly directly (e.g. from a vvvv-release)
2. Reference the VVVV.PluginInterfaces project from the vvvv-sdk

Both of these choices have drawbacks. Referencing directly requires the developer to update the assemblies manually with every new vvvv release, referencing the project enforced the inclusion of the whole vvvv-sdk which is quite large and sometimes tiresome to build.

Thanks to NuGet (a package manager for the windows development platform) and TeamCity (a build and NuGet server) a third choice emerged without the drawbacks mentioned above: referencing the assembly via a NuGet package.

Everytime our build server builds a new version of vvvv, it will also create a bunch of NuGet packages (VVVV.PluginInterfaces, VVVV.Utils, etc.) with the appropriate version information. When doing an alpha build those packages will be considered as a so called pre-release package by NuGet, when doing a beta build those packages will be considered as a stable release.

Now in order to create a plugin for vvvv by using NuGet, the developer has to:

1. Ensure the project is targeting at least .NET Framework 4.6.1 and is configured with the platforms x86 and x64.
2. Add http://teamcity.vvvv.org/guestAuth/app/nuget/v1/FeedService.svc/ as a NuGet package source in the settings of the NuGet package manager shipped with either Visual Studio or Sharp Develop.
3. Select the VVVV.PluginInterfaces package and click install.

NuGet will now download and add all the necessary dependencies to the project file and whenever a new version of vvvv is available, the NuGet package manager will ask whether or not to update the installed packages.

As of version 34.101 the packages should work in AnyCPU - for details see here

Announcing a random new feature: ctrl+F10 to toggle debugging spreadcounts

A link can have any of 4 styles:

• dotted: when carrying ø
• normal: when carrying 1 slice
• thin: when carrying a slicecount less than half of the patchs maximum spreadcount
• thick: when carrying a slicecount greater then half of the patchs maximum spreadcount
• fat: when carrying the patchs maximum spreadcount

We hope this to be specifically usefull when teaching beginners about spreads or hunting for large spreads or ø.

Available now in latest alpha builds

dear commercial users of vvvv,

it has been brought to our attention that you're looking for a way to protect your precious patches from some untrustworthy bunch.

для Вашего большой бизнеса

as announced during the keynode at node13 such a system is now in place and ready for testing. interested parties who are owners of an active (not older than a year) vvvv license please send an email with their postal address to licensing@vvvv.org to apply for a test-dongle. you'll then receive further instructions.

pricing and public availability still to be announced.

the mouse and keyboard nodes of vvvv have seen a complete rewrite in the lastest alpha version (29.4). their interface (in- and outputs) and behaviour is still the same, but under the hood they work differently:
up till now vvvv installed a so called system wide global hook on startup which rerouted mouse and keyboard messages from other processes to the vvvv process.
for reasons beyond the scope of this blog post, this caused random freezes of vvvv or even crashes of other processes. another issue was that it only worked with one vvvv instance at a time.
with the new nodes we got rid of those global hooks. in case of the window versions of the nodes we use a much safer technique called subclassing and in case of the global versions the keyboard and mouse states are retrieved at node evaluation.

hopefully this change shouldn't affect the user at all, if it does, please report in our alpha forum.

what's probably also worth mentioning is that the mouse nodes now output the state of XButton1 and XButton2.

to plugin developers:

• if you're writing a gui-plugin (eg. a renderer) and want the window versions of the mouse and keyboard nodes to work with your plugin, implement the new interface IUserInputWindow where you return the window handle of the control which has focus. for an example have a look at the source code of our svg renderer.
• MouseState uses the System.Windows.Forms.MouseButtons enumeration now.