First Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) bits released

Today was a big day for my team because we released the bits for the first CTP of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).

MEF is a framework that allows developers to declare what they need (i.e. Imports) and what they provide (i.e. Exports) and then automatically wire up everything at run-time. While that may be a slight over simplification it is the basic idea and can lead to a very loosely coupled system which can easily be extended and evolve overtime.

The primary goal of this CTP is to get the bits into people’s hands early to gather feedback from the community and feed it back into the product. We have already gotten some good feedback in response to Krzysztof’s blog post about MEF, and some of that feedback has already made its way into the CTP. Rest assured that there are still community asks that we are still actively working hard on.

Keep in mind these bits are very early and you should not get hung up on the names and exact shape of the API’s because they are likely to change. What we would really like is feedback on the basic concepts and any scenarios you feel MEF would be useful for but needs some fine tuning.

To get your hands dirty download the bits and have a look at the sample applications and docs. If you have questions or feedback by all means don’t hesitate to stop by our forum.

Expect so see some more posts from me and some of my teammates (Mitch, David, Krzysztof) on MEF in the coming months.

Enjoy!