How to realize plugins

[Mario Motta <mmotta guest net>]

hi all,
a target of mine is to realize plugins for VDKBuilder (a rad tool).
Plugin capability lets users construct their own widgets and plug them
into vdkbuilder without recompile it.
My idea is to realize them with shared libraries that can be
dinamically loaded by the vdkbuilder. Those libraries should implement
predefined function to achieve desired results.
Is this a good path ?
Some questions:
- how to programmatically load shared libraries?
- how to call predefined functions ?
- how to handle exceptions (i.e shared not present)
- hints, tricks and pitfalls
I know these informations can be found somewhere but if someone has
already
faced with this problem and want points me in the right direction
will make me save me a lot of time.

tia
/mario

-- 
Mario Motta, AI Research Group - Rimini
mmotta@guest.net; mmotta@programmers.net 
http://www.programmers.net/artic/Motta/vdk/index.htm