Managing Composition Through Lazy Loading Parts

So far in this post series, we've been looking at various aspects of working with MEF in the context of a single level of composition. One interesting thing about MEF is that its composition is recursive based on the assemblies and types identified in the catalogs within the container. What this means is that if one of our parts also has imports defined for parts of its own, the composition container will continue loading parts for the initial type as well as all parts loaded until no more parts are found or all imports are fulfilled. This is a really nice feature since it will ensure everything is ready for you once compose the initial type; however, this eager loading can greatly cause a performance issue if the parts are not constructed properly. In this post on our ongoing series about MEF, we'll look into the concept of parts of parts and how to apply lazy loading principles towards them.