Looking Around at Circular References in MEF

In the last post of this series, we created a new example code base used to display help text for various "commands". This was a simple code base that extended previous examples by using external assemblies and different catalogs to identify all of the parts that can be imported and mapped. This example covers a lot of scenarios when applied beyond the means of console-based text output since each imported "command" could literally be a functional piece of code by itself. However, what happens when the imports require something from our main application? When one object has a dependency with another object of another type; only for the dependent have a dependency towards the initial type; this is called a circular dependency. In this post, we're going to look at the condition of a circular dependency and see how MEF encounters such issues.