ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > ANY-maze plug-ins > The ANY-maze demo plug-in
The ANY-maze demo plug-in
Installing the demo plug-in
The ANY-maze demo plug-in is a standard part of ANY-maze, but it is not installed by default.
Click this link to install it now: 
Install ANY-maze demo plug-in
The plug-in code will be copied to a sub-folder of the ANY-maze.exe folder called Demo plug-in source files, and the plug-in DLL will be copied to the ANY-maze.exe folder itself.
After restarting ANY-maze, you will then find that the Analysis element of the Protocol (under Analysis options) will include a sub-entry for ANY-maze plug-ins, and that two plug-ins will be available:
| • | Animal in apparatus centre |
| • | Record animal positions |
Both the plug-ins include help, so you can use this to learn what they actually do.
Plug-in demo files
The Demo plug-in source files folder created by installing the demo plug-in (see above) includes the following files:
| PlugIn.h | This is the header file which defines the interface between ANY-maze and a plug-in. All plug-ins, not just the demo, should include this header file. A listing of this file can be found in the topic titled The PlugIn.h header file. |
| DemoPlugIn.cpp | This file contains the demo plug-in source code. Although it's a C++ file, the code is essentially just C. |
| DemoPlugIn.rc | This file contains the resources for the demo plug-in. A plug-in does not have to include resources, although if you implement a Settings window then you will need them. It's also good practice to store strings in resources rather than embedding them in the source. |
| resource.h | The resource header file, which contains the IDs of the resources used in the demo plug-in. This file is usually generated automatically by resource editors. |
| DemoPlugIn.dsp | The Visual Studio project file for the demo plug-in. This file was generated with Visual Studio 6 and should be recognised by all subsequent versions. |
If you are using Visual Studio 6 or later, then you can simply open the DemoPlugIn.dsp file and build the plug-in. (On more recent versions of Visual Studio, the file will be converted to a newer format automatically). Otherwise, you will need to create your own project - but this is usually quite easy to do. You should specify that the project will be a Win32 DLL, and then add the source files to it. Note that you should ensure that the project is set to build 32-bit or 64-bit code, depending on the version of ANY-maze that you are using (see Help -> About ANY-maze -> Program information -> Application version if you're unsure), and you should configure the project to use multi-threaded run-time libraries, because ANY-maze may call the plug-in from different threads.
As an alternative to installing the demo plug-in, you'll find a full listing of the demo plug-in source code in the topic titled The DemoPlugIn.cpp source code file.
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ANY-maze help topic T1001