Running plugins in separate application domain?

While testing plugins it came into my mind it would be good to unload plugin assemblies on the fly without need to restart whole application. Would it make sense to change nopCommerce architecture so plugin assemblies are loaded into separate application domain?

That's a good idea to speed up plugin development speed. Even watching the tutorials, it was pretty painful to have to clean and rebuild each time.

However, to get the benefits you're talking about, plugins would need to communicate through something like WCF, causing a lot higher overhead before we've done any useful work. This would also require some major changes in how all plugins are written, causing every single plugin to need to be updated.

Memory usage would also increase dramatically since each AppDomain needs its own set of dependencies. That's cool for sites with only a few plugins that are light on dependencies, but you could easily use up a ton of memory with plugins that have a lot of dependencies.

Until the team decides to update this, maybe what you can do is to disable unrelated plugins during development so that it doesn't take as long to load your site?

Here's a few other things you can do to make your development experience better:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/34395686/visual-studio-2015-is-extremely-slow