#altnetseattle – MEF, What is it?
- by GeekAgilistMercenary
I dived into the MEF session with Glenn Block, Sourabh Mathur, Brian Henderson, and others. Glenn covered the basic architectural ideas of MEF and then dived into a few examples. Is a framework around decoupling components. Built around the idea of discoverable type systems. Traditional extensibility mechanisms have a host and the respective extensions, commonly linking these two aspects with a form of registration. MEF removes the need for the registration part of the architecture and uses a contract. At some point with MEF you get down to parts, which removes even the complexity of a host or extensions, but a truly evolvable architecture based on natural growth of parts. Also referred to as the framework that removes the "new" keyword. The idea is that parts pull together other parts that they need. Between each part is a contract. Each part has imports or exports for the parts it needs or the things it offers. If one checks out the MEF Codeplex Site you will find a host of additional information. The framework download also has some decent examples that help one get kick started.
