I dived into the MEF session with Glenn Block, Sourabh Mathur, Brian Henderson, and others. Glenn covered the basic architectural ideas of MEF and then dived into a few examples.
- Is a framework around decoupling components.
- Built around the idea of discoverable type systems.
- Traditional extensibility mechanisms have a host and the respective extensions, commonly linking these two aspects with a form of registration.
- MEF removes the need for the registration part of the architecture and uses a contract.
- At some point with MEF you get down to parts, which removes even the complexity of a host or extensions, but a truly evolvable architecture based on natural growth of parts.
- Also referred to as the framework that removes the “new” keyword.
- The idea is that parts pull together other parts that they need. Between each part is a contract.
- Each part has imports or exports for the parts it needs or the things it offers.
If one checks out the MEF Codeplex Site you will find a host of additional information. The framework download also has some decent examples that help one get kick started.