Following up from my talk on MEF at SLCC on the weekend – where I ran through the fundamentals of MEF, developing applications in Silverlight, and answering questions about using MEF in applications - I thought I’d share some of the resources that I’ve found valuable when I started with MEF.
MEF on Codeplex
A great starting place for anyone looking into MEF. Installers, documentation, blogs and more.
MEF Forums
Have an issue? Trying something and its not working as you expect? Have a look here, someone else may have come across the same issue and found a fix.
MEF and Dependency Injection – How they Differ
I got the “Is this Dependency Injection?” question a few times over the weekend, and Glenn Block has a good list here of what MEF v1 does not support when you compare it to popular DI Containers such as Ninject, StructureMap or Unity.
MEF and Prism – How They Relate
Another interesting question that was raised is how MEF and Prism relate. While they may have inadvertently encroached on eachother’s turf, the feature parity and directions differ greatly. I expect some synergy between the two down the track (perhaps MEF support within Prism), but currently Prism has the specialised UI composition features (EventAggregator, Composite Commands) out-of-the-box that MEF doesn’t support in v1.
The Relationship Zoo
How do we identify and represent the relationships between components, especially as applications become more intricate?
Nicholas Blumhardt, maintainer of the Autofac project, did a great job of dissecting the patterns for defining relationships between components, and throws around some ideas about scenarios and future plans for this space.
Building Extensible Rich Internet Applications with MEF
Here is a session from PDC last year where Glenn talked about using MEF in Silverlight, including some of the Silverlight-specific features, such as PackageCatalogs and asynchronous downloading of XAP files.
PS: I’ve got some of my own thoughts and samples on the way, as well as some ideas about applying MEF to application scenarios.