Acceptable plugin startup time and returning an appropriate OnStatusCheck message

[mnsandler]

on a clean startup, my plugin may take up to 5-10 seconds if all goes well.

hs4 doesn't seem to like that and sometimes posts an error message on the plugin tile on the plugins/manage page (instead of calling OnStatusCheck and getting my status)

i tried starting on my own thread but that seemed to cause problems registering feature pages. maybe i should try this again

what are you guys doing to make the OnStatusCheck return message useful?

[dcorsus]

First thing I do, is start a very short timer and do just the basic house keeping items that take no time, then immediately return to HS4. When the timer expires, I do all the heavy lifting such as discovering players (up to 30 seconds), create all the devices, check for inconsistencies etc. If anything goes wrong during that extended intialization period, I change the status and provide a warning or error.

[stefxx]

I register all pages (RegisterDeviceIncPage and RegisterFeaturePage), check for valid DotNet/Mono version, and if that is OK I start a new thread. Finally I set the status to PluginStatus.Ok.

That is all my Initialize sub contains. Usually returns within a few milliseconds. If anything goes horribly wrong later I set the status to something like PluginStatus.Fatal.

[alexbk66]

+1 For initialising plugin in a thread. I'm using Task.Factory.StartNew