14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s Managed Extensibility Framework continues to evolve even independent of the next versions of Silverlight and .Net Framework. In this sense, the Managed Extensibility Framework project on CodePlex is now up all the way to Preview. In just seven months, Microsoft has delivered three development previews of the technology. It is important to underline that Managed Extensibility Framework Preview 9 on CodePlex is designed for .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 and Silverlight 3, and not for their successors, notes Nicholas Allen, program manager at Microsoft working on Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Silverlight, and other projects for the .NET Framework.
“The Managed Extensibility Framework makes it easier to create and reuse extensible applications by providing a standardized model for discovering and composing application plugins. This allows you to get an off the shelf component model without having to build the infrastructure yourself as part of your application. This one download includes binaries, source code, and product samples. Besides a new sample the primary changes in this preview are for Silverlight and fixing bugs,” Allen said.
The CodePlex variant of the Managed Extensibility Framework is a standalone resource provided for .NET 3.5 and Silverlight 3. The same is not the case for .NET 4 and Silverlight 4. Specifically, Microsoft has worked to integrate MEF into the next iterations of Silverlight and .NET. In this context, both the.NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) and the developer Beta of Silverlight 4 include the Managed Extensibility Framework.
“The phrase that I like to use to describe MEF is that it is a ‘framework for composing applications out of a set of loosely coupled parts that are discovered and can evolve at run time.’ That’s not an official “MEF team” definition – it’s just Mike’s view and there’s many places where MEF makes sense such as in building pluggable application architectures and also in implementing patterns like MVVM,” explained Mike Taulty, from Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft in the UK.
Managed Extensibility Framework Preview 6 is available for download here.
Silverlight 4 Beta is available for download here. .NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here.