My Technobabble

Disclaimer: This is not an encouragement to use MEF to replace your IoC container, these are guidelines to help those who are considering it's use. This has been a question we hear again and again both internally and externally. MEF in V1 is targetting...

<Warning>Long post follows</Warning> Lately there is a lot of momentum and interesting conversation around Model-View-View-Model. There’s several good resources out there that discuss the basics of the pattern, who the actors are that are...

Nick just posted on a new and very important feature we added in Preview 6 which we call Stable Composition. To give you an idea of why we added this, in the past if you had a part, say OrderProcessor, that had a required import of ILogger, and no logger...

As I am hoping you heard from Nick , we just shipped MEF Preview 6 which includes a version of MEF for Silverlight 3! At the same time that we’ve been wrapping up on our .NET 4.0 release, we are busy working on a proper release for Silverlight vNext....

Magnus has been off doing some interesting work around integrating MEF with Windows Azure . The first question you might be asking is Why? In his words, he set out to build a template for Windows Azure templates that: enables testability abstracts...

Next week, I am heading to Europe for two weeks to give several talks. My first stop is NDC 2009 , where I’ll be delivering the following talks: Framework Design Guidelines Building Maintainable Enterprise Applications with Silverlight and WPF...

Before I get into the post, let me start off with a word of advice for new bloggers. Never say in a post, this is the first of many to come. RESIST! You are just setting yourself up for never doing that second post. I know as the last post in this series...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/richardmoross/3064808115/ No we’re not actually making a movie about View Model. If we were I am sure we’d get a low turn-out. :-) However it did get your attention. What we are doing is some serious exploration into how we...

We recently shipped MEF preview 5 on Codeplex , an exciting release. In the latest release, you’ll find we’ve made quite a few changes, and some really powerful enhancements to our previous codebase. In this post, I’ll talk about those changes in detail...

Disclaimer: This is a prototype, not production ready code. It is more illustrative of what you can do with MEF, and how things work under the covers. The other day I was working one of our internal partners who is looking to integrate MEF into their...

Update: We've posted an extension for doing open generics in MEF contrib. Read about it here: http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/2009/08/20/open-generic-support-in-mef-contrib.aspx I get this question all the time. Recently it popped it’s head on...

Yesterday on twitter I was expressing how far behind I am  on blogging, and how I don’t know where to start. Ayende (Oren) responded by saying “Just start bloggging!” So here goes. Ben Hall pinged me over IM yesterday asking about recomposable imports...

I am sitting here at the opening of ALT.NET Seattle. I look around and see the words "Learn, Share, Grow” on a poster, words I first wrote on the ALT.NET wiki about two months ago. At the time I when I wrote it, I sat back and thought to myself ...

The title probably sounds like an oxymoron, but it is not. Recently there was a question on our CodePlex forums from Denis Vuyka about whether or not MEF supports anything like EventBroker for pub/sub type communication. Asking such a question makes a...

Today, I finally got around to uploading a CommonServiceLocator adapter for MEF. The code is actually quite simple thanks to Chris Tavares providing ServiceLocatorImplBase. (Updated thanks to feedback from several folks) public class MefServiceLocator...

If you haven’t seen Krys and David’s announcement, we just released another drop of MEF (I need to hold myself from breaking out in hysterics when I say that ) on CodePlex . This release contains a whole grab bag of goodies, some of which may initially...

If you attended ALT.NET Seattle least year, you might be wondering whether or not it's happening this year. While at Kaizenconf , a bunch of us wondered the same thing. David Laribee , Chris Bilson , Kelly Leahy and I chatted about hosting another...

OK, so you've past the point of deciding whether or not you will use an IoC container. Then you find out that is just the beginning of the road. How does that container fit in your application design? Should you pass it around, should you have a static...

In our last drop of MEF, one of the significant changes was the introduction of the ExportProvider . In this next series of posts, we'll take an in-depth look at what it is, how it's used by the CompositionContainer , and how you can use it to customize...

This post is long overdue , but if you hadn't heard, my bosses Brad Abrams and Krzysztof Cwalina (pronounced Kris-toff Tzvalyna [thanks to Monika Dyrda for the transliteration]) recently completed V2 of the renowned Framework Guidelines book. What...

Recently we were fortunate to have Nicholas Blumhardt join the MEF team. Before joining Microsoft, Nick was a busy man building enterprise software solutions, including developing Autofac , one of the popular IoC containers. Nick is very passionate about...

Lots of posts on Oxite . I won't reiterate what they've said, though Rob Conery has done a great analysis here . I'll just share my own quick brutally honest thoughts. There is no excuse for this. There are tons of folks both internal to Microsoft or...

Are you building an application that uses MEF? Want to present to the MEF team your app and tell us about your experience? If so, contact me.

Recently I have been doing a bunch of podcasts on MEF. Previously I had done a few with Hearding Code and Elegant Code . Back in the Hearding code days I was very new to the team and still trying to figure out exactly what MEF was about. Since then, we...

Matt Hawley has a nice set of posts where he explores a method to extend MEF to allow custom activated exports. MEF + Factories MEF + Factories Using an Export Provider Matt's scenario involves exporting a set of WCF proxies. WCF proxies can't simply...