Thursday, June 5, 2008

VSX future - will it be MEF?

Today I have noticed an interesting post in Aaron Marten blog, which is talking about Managed Extensibility Framework or just MEF. There is also some words about MEF from Krzysztof Cwalina.

Aaron assumes that this frameworks will be used for Visual Studio Extensibility platform in the future. The first version of MEF CTP June 4 2008 has been released just two days ago. As it mentioned in MEF Introduction materials:

What is MEF?

The Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF provides developers with a tool to easily add extensibility to their applications and with minimal impact on existing code. The application developer can define extension points according to the functionality required of an extension, while the extension developer uses those points to interact with the application.

MEF enables this extensibility to take place without creating a hard dependency in either direction. Applications can be extended at run time without recompilation, and extensions can be used by multiple applications sharing the same extension requirements. MEF also allows an application to delay the loading of an extension while still examining its metadata, enabling efficient traversal of large catalogs of extensions...

Maybe the next version of Visual Studio IDE will be architected with MEF.Who knows?..

Keep in touch and happy extending!

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