Windows plugins no longer require manual steps

[Stuart Morgan]

There is now preliminary end-to-end support in the 'flutter' tool for adding plugins to a project on Windows. That means that all you need to do for Windows is add plugins to your pubspec.yaml, and the tool will take care of the rest; no more manual addition of projects and project dependencies in Visual Studio.

Two important notes:

- If you have previously added plugins manually you need to start from a fresh solution file (i.e., re-copy Runner.sln from example/). The tool won't correctly handle any plugins that were added manually, so you'll get duplicate project entries on your next build if you don't.

- The details of how this is structured are still subject to change without warning. That means you still shouldn't publish Windows plugins to pub.dev, as anything published now is extremely likely to stop working in some future version of Flutter.

-Stuart

[Stuart Morgan]

This is now true for Linux as well! As with Windows, you should re-start with a fresh Makefile, as the way plugin targets are managed has changed.

Also, a step which applies to both Windows and Linux is that for an existing project that includes desktop plugins you will need to update the timestamp of your pubspec.yaml when you make the new build files, to trigger the creation of the plugin-related generated build files.

-Stuart

[Tom Verbeek]

That's great news!