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Has anyone worked much with Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)? Kinda sounds like it’s trying to be all things to all people – It’s an add-in manager! It’s duck typing! I’m wondering if anyone has an experience with it, positive or negative.
We’re currently planning on using an generic IoC implementation ala MvcContrib for our next big project. Should we throw MEF in the mix?
We are not aiming for MEF to be an all-purpose IoC. The best way to think about the IoC aspects of MEF is an implementation detail. We use IoC as a pattern because it is a great way to address the problems we are looking to solve.
MEF is focused on extensibility. When you think of MEF look at it as an investment in taking our platform forward. Our future products and the platform will leverage MEF as a standard mechanism for adding extensibility. Third-party products and frameworks will also be able to leverage this same mechanism. The average ‘user’ of MEF will author components that MEF will consume and will not be directly consuming MEF within their applications.
Imagine when you want to extend our platform in the future, you drop a dll in the bin folder and you are done. The MEF enabled app lights up with the new extension. That’s the vision for MEF.