[Paraview] Writing/Deploying Paraview Plugins

[Mike Jackson]

I have been asked to write some Paraview readers and filters for our data
and I have some questions that the Paraview book is not answering for me (or
at least that I could find).
 Having taken a Paraview class in the past I have a basic idea of what needs
to be done but since the deployment is on Windows XP and I am mainly a Mac
OS X developer I have some questions.

1. What is the "Windows Binary" that is downloadable from vtk.org compiled
with? MSVC? MinGW?

2. As I understand things the user can load my plugins at runtime. But do
they have to manually load the plugin every time they launch Paraview? Is
there a config file on windows that I can setup to automatically load the
plugins at every launch or do I have to Recompile Paraview with my code
included to get that to work?

3. Assuming I might have to recompile Paraview on Windows what is the basic
procedure? I have MS VC 2005 (Full Edition) available? I also have a MinGW
evn setup and ready to go.

4. Along the lines of 3, do I have Cmake create nmake files, VS project
files or something else to compile Paraview?


I know some of these are some basic questions but I would like to hear from
other paraview programmers so I can get up to speed as quick as I can.

Thanks
-- 
Mike Jackson   Senior Research Engineer
Innovative Management & Technology Services