In a previous post, I discussed the trends towards building extensible applications. In that post, I highlighted four technologies that I felt were significant towards building extensible applications. In this post, I’ll look at the first of those technologies: the Managed Extensibility Framework, also known as MEF.
MEF is a new component-based application framework that was integrated into .NET 4.0. MEF itself was actually built by Microsoft as an open source project on CodePlex, but the intent was always to build it into the .NET 4.0 Framework and use it for some of Microsoft’s products. For example, Visual Studio 2010 uses MEF as its extensibility framework that developers can use to build custom components that integrate with Visual Studio. There’s a growing market of free and commercial extensions that in a matter of weeks since the release of Visual Studio 2010 have made the product so much better. More...