On Friday, we posted an update to the FinFolio beta. We are planning on doing weekly updates during the Beta period as we make changes and fixes. This is primarily because we need to do regular custodial interface updates now that we're getting good feedback from the beta sites.

This last update included the developer example project, which is a Visual Studio 2008 project that can be compiled as a FinFolio add-in. Compile the sample project to a DLL, drop that DLL into the /Program Files/FinFolio/Plugins directory, and fire up FinFolio. You'll know it installed correctly by clicking the FinFolio Options button from the main FinFolio menu and selecting Add-Ins. You should see the FinFolio Examples as one of the Add-Ins:

With the plugin enabled, you will see a new ribbon strip, with groups and buttons that open pages demonstrating different aspects of FinFolio extensibility. The examples are far from complete, but you can already see how to add tabs to existing screens and use the object model to create data like households, portfolios, accounts, clients, etc. You can add screens, wizards, buttons, groups and ribbons, open existing screens, and create business logic and alerts.

The beta also has Visual Studio 2008 templates and snippets that help you extend FinFolio from Visual Studio. They are written in C# and can be installed using the instructions in the installation ZIP file. Once they're installed, you can right-click and add FinFolio objects like screen tabs, business rules, and graphs. Select the FinFolio group in the "Add New Item" dialog to see all the FinFolio templates.

The current examples are just a start and we'll be adding more with each release. They are an extension of the original example project we had in the FinFolio alphas, which are now located in the "/Alpha Examples/" folder.
FinFolio's extensibility is extremely important to our strategic vision of the product, so we're eager for feedback.

Editor’s Note: This was written before FinFolio’s official release. We decided not to support the add-in templates. You can still do everything described in the post, but you need to cut and paste from our C# Examples project instead of using a preinstalled template.