With the MEF DirectoryCatalog, it is easy to load extensions from a given directory for a MEF Application.  The DirectoryCatalog will scan any assemblies in that directory and find MEF extensions in those assemblies.  This means that adding...

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) helps make it easy to write extensible applications.  We hope that it is simple to understand the basics and get started.  However, MEF brings with it the possibility of new types of failures. ...

TechEd North America 2010 is in a few weeks, and I will be giving a presentation on MEF.  Below is the session description: DEV05-INT | What's Wrong with My .NET Extensible MEF Application? Thursday, June 10 | 8:00 AM – 9:15 AM | Rm 347 The Managed...

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is designed to allow open-ended extensibility. It is easy to define a contract and load extensions which satisfy the contract. This is accomplished with a collection import, which can look like this: [ImportMany...

This week I was on the Herding Code podcast, discussing how we do testing on the MEF team and at Microsoft.  You can listen to it here . This was the first podcast I’ve been on and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  Some lessons learned: When recording...

In the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), an import has a cardinality, which expresses how many exports can be used to satisfy the import.  The possible values are ZeroOrOne, ExactlyOne, or ZeroOrMore, and they can be declared in the following...

With the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), you can use Import and Export attributes to declare what a class consumes and what it offers.  For example, below is an example of two different shapes and a toolbox that imports all available shapes...

MEFGrid is a sample MEF application that I presented at Seattle Code Camp and at an Olympia .NET user group meeting. It includes connect 4 and the game of life, but other grid based games could be written and dropped into the extensions directory. ...

I am giving a session on the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) this Sunday at Seattle Code Camp . I will be demoing how to build an extensible application using MEF. It will be fun (I hope), heavily code-focused, and will cover most of the core features...