JQuery has simplified a lot of my day to day coding. I think it is an amazing little framework and apparently a lot of people do too. Even Microsoft is bundling it with its ASP.NET MVC framework which , as far as I know, a first for open source software. Beyond even handling all the all of the cross browse mess, my favorite part of jQuery is the ability to easily extend the framework through plug-in. That brings us to the topic for this post. We are going to look at how easy it is to create a plug-in for jQuery.

What Will Our Plugin Do?

For this post I want to pick something that is fairly simple yet demonstrates the power of plugins. For this post I am going to show you how to create a plug-in that will highlight keywords in a given block of text. Many websites use something similar when performing searches.

Although Dev102 is a blog about software tips, web and technology reviews, I want to introduce you something which is a little bit out of context. Most people, know and use Microsoft Outlook as their email application and are spending too much time searching for conversations, attachments, and other important information in their inbox. A company names Xobni introduce us a free Outlook plugin which offers a new way to organize and search the Outlook email.

I am currently working on a project with a pluggable application (load plugins at runtime and execute them) that loads assemblies at runtime, using the Assembly.LoadFile() method. I wanted to test it using NUnit (feel free to read our 3 Ways to Run NUnit from Visual Studio post). Although, the code was functioning very well it always failed during the NUnit tests, always! It took me several days to understand what went wrong and I want to share you with my findings.