New plugin development: where to download SDL Studio 2017?

Hello community,

We are considering a development of a new Machine Translation plugin for SDL studio. It's our first experience with plugin development with SDL so please forgive me for any trivial question I may ask.

We would like developing our plugin starting with Studio 2017 for two reasons: resources out there refer to this version, so we would like to start with a consolidated experience and, most important, we would start with a version that has more users in order to extend the support once we have a much clearer view on how to properly build a plugin. The problem is that we cannot find the download link anywhere now that 2019 is out.

Can you please point me to the right direction?

Further more, is there a "developer" version of SDL Studio that we developers can use to create and maintain our plugin? Something like a free, limited version just for devs. There is usually a 30-days trial, but I think it's pretty hard to complete the plugin in this lifespan (moreover because we do not have any experience with that), and it would be a problem to develop updates and bugfixes anyways.

What is the standard way to proceed?

Thanks to all for your help, it's much appreciated!

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  • Hello Davide,

    I also recently started developing plugins for Trados 2017.  Luckily for  me, my employer already has Trados 2017 installed on the office computers, so I didn't have to download it.  You are totally right about the unavailability of 2017 now that 2019 has been released.  I also can't find it anywhere online!

    All I can offer in terms of plugin developing advice is:

    1. Download Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 or 2019 (the Community version is free), as you will need it to write the code for the plugin
    2. The existing Trados plugins that exist on the SDL Github page are extremely useful for reference

    I downloaded all the source code for a plugin called "SDLTM Repair" from the Github site, opened it with Visual Studio 2017, and was able to reverse-engineer it within about a week.  You can basically use the plugins on Github as templates, and use Visual Studio to edit them and modify them, and in the end create your own plugin.

    There is very little documentation that exists on the internet about how all the Trados DLLs and APIs work, so trial-and-error may be a big part of your development process.  Good luck with your plugin, machine translation is the future of translation!

    -- Todd

  • Hi Todd,

    thanks for the link! I didn't know SDL Github, it is super useful.

    I have the project setup and I am literally ready to start the development, the only problem is I don't have SDL 2017, this is really annoying...

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