I attended a meeting of CMAP (Central Maryland .NET Professionals) tonight. They had a presentation on Microsoft's Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).
First impressions are that MEF isn't fully baked. It's a collection of add-in classes to C# (not sure that it works with any other .NET language) that lets you build components and connect to them at run-time. In many ways, it is like the concept of a DLL for the initial version of Windows.
Like any technology, it has its upsides and downsides. First the downs:
MEF imposes a fair amount of work on the user; it bleeds into your application, requiring you to code a bit of plumbing. It allows you to mix the plumbing and your business logic; there is nothing to help you separate them. It relies on attributes, those square-bracketed phrases which pollute your code. The code you add is verbose, with long namespace names and long class names.
On the upside, it lets you build applications that bind to objects at runtime. Nifty, yet I'm not sure that this is such a good thing. It seems to have the same problems as the early implementation of DLLs. They, too, let your application bind to objects at runtime. But the incompatibilities between versions lead to many broken applications and the eventual coining of the phrase "DLL hell".
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