Nicholas Blumhardt

I've moved back to Redmond and again work on the .NET framework. I don't currently plan on reviving this blog. You can find me online at my personal blog or keep up with our team via the BCL team blog . Thanks for dropping by!

The last year in Redmond has been truly amazing. Besides working with the great people in the .NET team and elsewhere at Microsoft – an experience that can’t be done justice in a brief blog post like this – I’ve also had a chance to take in Seattle and...

This morning Dave came up with a great suggestion for finding MEF composition problems from within Visual Studio. By registering the composition analyzer as an external tool, the root cause of a composition problem can be located in a flash! Step 1 -...

Since working on a clinical outcomes review system a couple of years ago, I’ve been aware of the gap between simple hand-coded workflows and the full-blown workflow tools. Stateless embodies the idea that a state machine can use closures to implement...

In MEF Preview 6 we shipped a sample assembly called Microsoft.ComponentModel.Composition.Diagnostics , demonstrating the kinds of things that can be determined by (semi-) statically analyzing MEF catalogs. With Preview 7 we added a utility that makes...

Disclaimer: This functionality is not shipping in .NET 4 (but is available in the recent CodePlex drops , see below for more details.) The golden rule of using composition to simplify your architecture is to avoid calling the container directly . Until...

Disclaimer: As usual, this blog post is discussing pre-release software, which may differ from the final released version. Ayende once observed that MEF is very focused on dependency management. It’s an accurate description of the driving force that has...

In the three months that have passed since the last release, we’ve been very busy making final adjustments to get closer to RTM. In this post I’ve summarized the biggest changes between the Preview 5 and Preview 6 releases. The highlights are: ...

This week I took some time out to talk to Richard and Carl on .NET Rocks! about Autofac, MEF and component-oriented software in general. If you have any questions about material from the show, please feel free to post them in the comments.

I was reminded today of Stateless , a little project that I’m quite fond of. Stateless is a hierarchical state machine framework based on Simple State Machine for Boo , but configured using C# 3.0. When I announced Stateless last year , I hardly even...

Start to schematically represent any component system and you’re likely to come up with a diagram like: So what do the dependency and the service actually mean ? In most implementations, each is associated with a key: Here the Screen Renderer component...

There has been a lot of discussion among IoC container users about the similarities between MEF and IoC containers. Most of this has been addressing the question - “should MEF and an IoC container be used in the same app, or are they exclusive?” One possible...

We had a great little open discussion on building IoC-driven apps today at ALT.NET Seattle. A handful of good points came up: Building aggregate object graphs for the UI layer is giving people headaches Dynamic instantiation patterns like...

A number of IoC containers have Silverlight versions - Ninject and Unity especially seem to have healthy Silverlight offerings. Silverlight 2.0 is a variant of the .NET runtime, so this isn't too surprising. Thanks to Tyson Stolarski and Rinat Abdullin...

The first post in this series introduced the problem of accessing IoC container features dynamically. We brushed over two common patterns: Global Container (or Static Service Locator ) Injected Context Before we move on from this topic, I'd like to look...

As a follow up from my last post about Global Container vs. Injected Context , I would like to share this snippet from Component Software , which casts the difference between the two approaches in another light: "A software component is a unit of...

There is surprisingly little information out there in cyberspace on how IoC containers should fit into application architectures. In parallel with my MEF/Ruby series, I'm going to discuss some of the principles that I believe should be applied to ...

Since the last installment in this little series, I've started to consider how Ruby/C# hybrid MEF applications might look. The result is yet another component-based calculator: Besides the Radiohead arithmetic , there is one reason to get excited... Ruby...

Well, the "Ruby Parts" implementation is slowly taking shape. If you haven't read the first article you probably should before you read on. Exports An export is an object that a part will hand to the outside world to fulfil a contract . Sometimes...

MEF is fascinating because of the way some initial assumptions led to a different flavor of composition technology from the ones we've seen for .NET to date. In my opinion, the most exciting ‘parameter variation’ in the design process for...