Managed World

What a great week to be a developer. First, the latest Parallel Extensions CTP was released to the net, and now the first Managed Extensibility Framework CTP has been released onto Code Gallery.

So what is the Managed Extensibility Framework? From the announcement:

"The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) provides developers with a tool to easily add extensibility to their applications and with minimal impact on existing code. The application developer can define extension points according to the functionality required of an extension, while the extension developer uses those points to interact with the application.

MEF enables this extensibility to take place without creating a hard dependency in either direction. Applications can be extended at run time without recompilation, and extensions can be used by multiple applications sharing the same extension requirements. MEF also allows an application to delay the loading of an extension while still examining its metadata, enabling efficient traversal of large catalogs of extensions."

To make a medium-size story even shorter, the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is essentially a framework for dependency inversion/inversion of control.

If you are a CTP junkie and like to play around with all the latest bits like I do, you have some downloading to do :P. Enjoy!