Unable to load a work-in-progress JMeter plugin

This is mostly search engine bait, but it might help someone.

I’m doing some testing on JMeter, creating a plugin to extend it, and I had this weird problem where it would not load up the class and add it to the JMenu instance, even though the classes were getting loaded by the JVM. It turns out that I needed to add a search path to the VM arguments.

-Dsearch_paths=C:\Users\kschr\eclipse-workspace\JMeterLoadTestAddons\bin;.

And that worked.

So if you’re coming to this page with the same problem I had I hope that this helps.