Managed Extensibility Framework: What It is and Where It is Going

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Managed Extensibility Framework: What It is and Where It is Going(www.infoq.com)

submitted by dpeterson(4393) 7 months, 11 days ago

Johnathan Allen aims to set the record straight on what MEF is, what it's used for, how it's being abused/misused today, and what the future holds.

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posted by Noldorin(829) 7 months, 11 days ago 0

While it is very true that MEF is specifically an extensibility framework and not a general IoC one, extensibility is in fact a very generic and common functionality (or 'pattern' if you will). Thinking of extensibility just in terms of plugins misses the big picture. The observer pattern (including events) is itself an extensibility system, while the MVVM pattern makes heavy use of extensibility. Using MEF in such a context (for example injecting view-models) would not be wrong. Many developers I speak with these days do not even feel the need for a fully fledged IoC framework.

posted by dpeterson(4393) replied to Noldorin(829), 7 months, 11 days ago 0

I found the same with my last project: I used Caliburn.Micro and MEF and didn't use an IoC framework at all.

posted by Noldorin(829) replied to dpeterson(4393), 7 months, 11 days ago 0

Yeah. In this case, it seems extensibility really *is* what you want and IoC usage is second-hand. Quite appropiate, in my view.

posted by vijayst(1311) 7 months, 10 days ago 0

When I first looked at MEF, it looked as if it was an overkill for doing simple extensions. For this, defining extension classes should do the trick.

In most cases, we want the functionality of one component to be replaced by another. For this, a light-weight IoC framework can do the job of substituting one component for another.

As the post points out, MEF is useful to add additional features to a feature rich application. It also provides configurability of features to the end-user.

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