Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) CTP2 Released – Now with the full source

Brad Abrams - Microsoft Extensibility Framework released on CodePlex

“I am super jazzed that we released the Microsoft Extensibility Framework CTP2 on CodePlex. 

http://www.codeplex.com/MEF

We have taken a lot of good feedback in from the community... a few cool things here:

1. We shipped source code!
2. We have a complete set of developer Overviews,  guidelines and samples.
3. Because of community feedback, we now support constructor injection
4. MEF itself is now more extensible... For example, want POCO?, no problem, it is now possible to write an extension to store the customer attribute metadata in an external file.    More to come here, but it is a solid start!

…”

Krzysztof Cwalina - MEF on CodePlex

“…

The changes are quite significant:

1. The preview ships with sources under a very permissive license (Ms-LPL).
2. We now support constructor injection. Feature that the community asked for.
3. We completely redesigned MEF’s extensibility points. …
4. We significantly cleaned up the container APIs…

…”

Managed Extensibility Framework – What Is MEF?

“The Managed Extensibility Framework (or MEF for short) simplifies the creation of extensible applications. MEF offers discovery and composition capabilities that you can leverage to load application extensions.

What problems does MEF solve?

MEF presents a simple solution for the runtime extensibility problem. Until now, any application that wanted to support a plugin model needed to create its own infrastructure from scratch. Those plugins would often be application-specific and could not be reused across multiple implementations.

• MEF provides a standard way for the host application to expose itself and consume external extensions. Extensions, by their nature, can be reused amongst different applications. However, an extension could still be implemented in a way that is application-specific. Extensions themselves can depend on one another and MEF will make sure they are wired together in the correct order (another thing you won't have to worry about).
• MEF offers a set of discovery approaches for your application to locate and load available extensions.
• MEF allows tagging extensions with additonal metadata which facilitates rich querying and filtering

…”

Managed Extensibility Framework – MEF Preview 2

“Welcome to the first MEF Source Preview

…
Disclaimer: MEF is in development. The source available on this site, does not reflect the final state of the product. It is also not a CTP, or a Beta. It is very likely that the apis within will evolve and change. If you are downloading the source, consider it a preview of where we are at currently. We'd welcome any feedback you have on your experience.
This is the second preview of MEF, though the first which contains MEF source. The first preview was released as a CTP on CodeGallery. This drop includes full source for MEF as well as several sample applications.
Samples within include:

• Meflook - Outlook like client*
• Meftris - Tetris like game with shapes as plug-ins.*
• Extensible File Explorer - File explorer with extensible views, favories file viewers and shell services*

For documentation on the samples click here.

…”

Added to my “Must look at soon” and my “Follow up at PDC” lists.

Very cool to see the release of the source followed through. Firing it up in VS now… ;)

 

Related Past Post XRef:
The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) CTP Released (Not to be confused with the Managed Addin Framework [MAF] which became System.Addin)