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1 Question Extensibility Survey

WCF has a whole lot of extensibility points. Many of those extensibility points use similar systems for describing and installing extensions, but overall you still end up with multiple ways of doing extensibility depending on what you're extending.

The Managed Extensibility Framework is a standardized plugin model for dynamically composing applications. If you haven't heard of MEF before, there's an introduction on the site, a short demo together with Visual Studio, and a longer explanation. These types of plugin frameworks seem to be increasingly popular as a way of extending the application development experience.

Question:

How would you expect a more uniform model for extensibility to make developing or using WCF applications easier, cheaper, or better?

(There are absolutely no plans at this time for using MEF with WCF or changing the extensibility model. I'm just curious what your impressions are.)

Published Monday, November 10, 2008 5:00 AM by Nicholas Allen
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Comments

Monday, November 10, 2008 9:06 AM by Lars Wilhelmsen

# re: 1 Question Extensibility Survey

Hi Nicholas,

An interesting question. Now that IoC/DI containers and loosely coupled extensibility is starting to become more mainstream in the .NET world, it might be that MEF-style extension points in WCF (and other bits from CSD) would make it easier to unify a lot of the extensibility options.

Today the plethora of extensibility points in WCF is just mind boggling for the average Joe the Developer out there :-)

--larsw

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