AI cannot load plugin

Question

I am under developement of a plugin.
The plugin used to get loaded upto the recent times.
AI gives a message "Error loading plugins XXXX.aip" with no further details.
Code is with no compilation error (of course )
Have anybody a clue of what might be a potential reason for this ??

Answer 1

Bleh. There are a lot of reasons that could cause that, and there's no easy "Just do this" answer unfortunately. When I get that, the first thing I usually do is rebuild the whole plugin just to make sure. Once in a long while that helps, but not usually. Next, you need to check whatever output you can find. Sometimes there's a clue in there. On Windows, you can look at the output and if your plugin requires a bunch of support DLLs, you can see where they all start to get loaded; if suddenly during that list the output indicates that they're suddenly 'Unloading', that might mean the next DLL (one that was *not* shown as 'Loading') might be your problem. Then I'd break out Depends, and look at the AIP to see if there's something missing. I don't know what the equivilant on Mac would be, but presumably there's something similar.
Next, again on Windows, I'd check the Event Viewer. I think its under Application events, but you might find that you're running into a SideBySide error, which essentially means you need to install the correct run time. If this is happening in Debug, that wouldn't be your problem, but if you're trying to run a compiled plugin on another machine, it might be this.
Lastly, I'd put a breakpoint in the entry point of the plugin and see if you're getting even that far. If you are, its a code issue and you can step through. If you don't even get that far, it's probably one of the things above somehow.