Note: This document describes features that are not yet available in Rhino. It is expected in a WIP release of Rhino 5.0 in February 2010.

The Rhino Installer Engine simplifies distribution, installation, and updating of plug-ins for Rhino 4.0 and 5.0 on both 32- and 64- bit platforms. The Rhino Installer Engine is compatible with the McNeel Update System - a system that keeps Rhino 5.0 up-to-date with the latest releases. This system will keep plug-ins up-to-date as well.

All plug-ins are installed per-user as part of the user's roaming profile.

A Rhino Installer File (.RHI) is a zip file with a different extension. The RHI file can contain directory structures, and can include more than one version of a plug-in. For example:

  myPlugIn\4.0\myPlugIn.rhp
  myPlugIn\5.0\x86\myPlugIn.rhp
  myPlugIn\5.0\x64\myPlugIn.rhp

The Rhino Installer Engine examines each of the plug-ins and extracts the Plug-in GUID, Title, Version, and appropriate SDK version numbers. It also examines each Rhino installed on the computer.

Next, each plug-in is compared to each installed version of Rhino. The newest compatible plug-in is registered with the corresponding version of Rhino.

• Making your C++ plug-in compatible with the Rhino Installer Engine
• Making your C# plug-in compatible with the Rhino Installer Engine
• RHI file authoring guidelines
• Configuring Automatic Updates for your Plug-in

• The Rhino Installer Engine will copy files from the RHI archive, and will register the plug-ins it finds. No other execution is done.
• Currently, it is not possible to digitally sign RHI files. This means it is also not possible to verify the source of RHI files.
• The Rhino Installer Engine is currently available with Rhino 5.0. It will install plug-ins for Rhino 4.0, but there isn't a separate redistributable for the Rhino Installer Engine for Rhino 4.0 - we plan to do this once the kinks are ironed out a bit.

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