Your Application in Pieces - MEF and MAF
Speaker: Kathleen Dollard, MVP
When: Thursday, May 7th, 2009 6:30PM
Where: VersaTrans Solution, Latham, NY
Session Recording: For registered users only!
Slides and code: Coming soon!
Decoupling portions of your application has tremendous
payback during both development and maintenance. Your application becomes
more testable and flexible and can more easily evolve to meet changing
demands. Decoupling your application also allows a new level of
partnership with external groups because you can safely incorporate their
code in your application without recompiling or releasing source code.
Microsoft has exposed different provider models in many areas of the
framework and libraries, and this year has moved toward consolidating its
efforts at decoupling with the Managed Extensibility Framework, or MEF.
This tool differs from an IoC container because its focused directly at
simplifying the extension of applications and focuses at extensibility, discover,
and composition. The underlying engine can support Microsoft efforts like
Visual Studio and your own applications. MEF comes up short when you
encounter isolation and versioning issues, such as wanting that external
code to run in its own AppDomain. The Managed Add-In Framework, or MAF,
focuses on these problems and the significant complexity they bring with
System.AddIn namespace of .NET 3.5. You’ll learn more about
architecting applications in pieces and the sweet spot of using MEF and MEF
together. You’ll leave ready to evaluate the role of MEF and MAF in
your applications.
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Kathleen Dollard
is a consultant, author, trainer, and speaker. She’s been a Microsoft
MVP for over ten years and has spoken about .NET in 28 states and 5
countries. She’s written dozens of articles including the “Ask
Kathleen” column in Visual Studio Magazine. She also wrote “Code
Generation in Microsoft .NET” (Apress). Her passion is helping
programmers be smarter in how they develop by learning to better use
.NET languages, libraries and platforms. She works with WPF, WF, as
well as core technologies including System.AddIn. She’s currently
creating template infrastructure for code generation using VB XML
literals. After working on the problem of capturing business intent in
metadata and test definitions for years, she’s working with industry
improvements in these areas. She’s also working on full life cycle
improvements, such as unit testing, better debugging and static
analysis (FxCop). When not working, she enjoys woodworking,
snowshoeing, and kayaking depending on the outdoor temperature.
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