Dave's Box : Releases, MEF

New Managed Extensibility Framework drop

David Kean — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

We’ve dropped another version of the Managed Extensibility Framework over on our CodePlex site.

Changes since the last drop:

Diagnostics improvement. We now provide a lot more information in error messages when something goes wrong with composition. We’ve also made the main types look a lot better under the debugger.
Lifetime/Creation Policy. Importers can now request a specific creation policy (ie shared or non-shared) for an injected object if they so want. Non-disposable non-shared objects can now be GC’d before the container is disposed (before it used to hold onto them indefinitely).
Ripped AllowNonPublicCompositionAttribute. We now always inject private and internal members.
Namespace cleanup. We’ve added a couple of sub namespaces under System.ComponentModel.Composition, called ‘Hosting’ and ‘Primitives’. Hosting contains types commonly used only by host applications, such as ExportProvider, CompositionContainer and the catalogs. Primitives contains types for implementing a custom programming model, such as ComposablePart, ImportDefinition and ExportDefinition.
Type name cleanup. Gone are the hideously long type names; AttributedAssemblyPartCatalog, AttributedTypesPartCatalog, AggregratingComposablePartCatalog, and in their place; AssemblyCatalog, TypeCatalog and AggregateCatalog.

Check it out, and tell us what you think.

New Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) Preview

David Kean — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:10:00 GMT

We have released an update to the Managed Extensibility Framework over on our new site on CodePlex.

There have been quite a few changes since our last release, including:

Shared Source (released under the MS-LPL license)
Constructor injection (via the ImportingConstructorAttribute)
API cleanup and naming changes
New primitives model for building custom programming models (such as adding POCO support)

Check it out and tell us what you think over on the MEF forum.

Announcing the Managed Extensibility Framework CTP

David Kean — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:45:00 GMT

I’m pleased to announce that we’ve just released a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Managed Extensibility Framework. Krzysztof Cwalina has previously mentioned a little about what my team’s been working on and this release is a very early look at our progress so far.

The goal of this CTP is get early and actionable feedback from the community. One thing I want to make clear is that nothing is set in stone; naming, members, types and extensions points can and will likely change in the future. To have an impact on our future direction, feel free to head over to our new forum and tell us what you think.

Download the Managed Extensibility Framework from MSDN Code Gallery today.