A Beginners Guide for MEF 2 (Preview)

CodeProject - MEF 2 Preview Beginners Guide

"Introduction

This is the year all .NET developers will be licking there lips at the excitement and anticipation around yet another version release of our beloved framework of choice. So in the spirit of all things new and exciting. Today I'll be discussing one of my favourites MEF. We all know about MEF's sheer ability to bring about simplicity in implementation, in a development environment defined by complexities, on a day to day basis. Firstly I will be discussing the key features that have been added to MEF2 so far, that I think will make a massive impact upon the release of .NET 4.5. However please note this is more of a sneak peek and not all of what I show you will be in the final version. At time of writing this article the current MEF 2 version is Preview. The new features that will be discussed include The ExportFactory<T> and the new registration API called the RegistrationBuilder to name a few. So let's dive in.

Background

This is a beginners' guide to quickly get you familiar to some of the key changes that have been implemented in MEF 2. So you can start using the preview version straight away with no additional research and understanding.

Setting it all up

Firstly for those of you who have already used the first iteration of MEF, you will have noticed a few distinct differences between the first release and the new upcoming release. One of the subtle changes is all the common export catalogs; now contain an additional constructor overload. This parameter argument is for a new class called the RegistrationBuilder. This class handles the registration of all your exports and part creation through the RegistrationBuilders rich API. So you no longer need to worry about placing attributes on all your dependencies. This was a great move by the team who developed MEF, because MEF’s main role is to provide an easy implementation of dependency injected types for loosely coupled architecture and extensible projects. Any developer extending the functionality of a project doesn’t have to now worry about setting up attributes on the objects he or she wishes to inject. Let’s jump into an example setup below; As you can see in the code snippet below MEF is more flexible with its object lifetime management, as well as the other new features I mentioned above. Now that you are completely bored with me rambling on let me show you how the container and a simple export is set up.

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I thought this a very good introduction to MEF 2 and appreciated its comparisons to MEF 1 (This is how you did it before, this is how you can do it now...). If you MEF, you should give this a read...