The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

4/28/2010 6:00:00 PM

Location: Nebraska Book Company - 5240 S. 19th Street

Composable applications are made of building blocks – like Legos. Composability is an extension of many ideas that have fueled architecture evolution in the last twenty years, including isolation, the creation of tiers, and testable applications. Silverlight and .NET now contain the Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF to provide composability. MEF is available in .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 3.0 via downloads and in the box for .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0. In the first part of this talk, I’ll cover what composability is and the three broad categories – extensions, fully composed applications, and architecturally composed applications.  The second part of the talk dives into the technical aspects of MEF and how to use it. MEF itself is fully extensible with many possible models for defining composition parts. I’ll skip the theoretical approaches and stick with the mainstream attributed model. You’ll learn how to incorporate this attributed model into your own applications to define and retrieve parts. The end of the talk will briefly cover the challenges of debugging MEF, including an introduction to stable composition and its implications. You’ll leave understanding when MEF might be a good fit for your applications today and insight into how profoundly MEF is likely to change architectures in the relatively near future.

Speaker: Kathleen Dollard
Kathleen Dollard is a consultant, author, trainer, and speaker. She’s been a Microsoft MVP for over ten years and has spoken about .NET in 28 states and 5 countries. She’s written dozens of articles including the “Ask Kathleen” column in Visual Studio Magazine. She also wrote “Code Generation in Microsoft .NET” (Apress). Her passion is helping programmers be smarter in how they develop by learning to better use .NET languages, libraries and platforms. She works with WPF, WF, as well as core technologies including System.AddIn. She’s currently creating template infrastructure for code generation using VB XML literals. After working on the problem of capturing business intent in metadata and test definitions for years, she’s working with industry improvements in these areas. She’s also working on full life cycle improvements, such as unit testing, better debugging and static analysis (FxCop). When not working, she enjoys woodworking, snowshoeing, and kayaking depending on the outdoor temperature.

Event Type: Meeting