Managed Extensibility Framework
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| Developer(s) | Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Stable release |
V1 in .NET Framework 4.0 / April 12, 2010
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| Preview release |
V2 Preview 5 / December 19, 2011
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| Written in | .NET Languages |
| Type | Web application framework |
| License | Ms-PL |
| Website | mef.codeplex.com |
Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a component of .NET Framework 4.0 aiming to create lightweight, extensible applications. It aims to allow .NET application developers to discover and use extensions with no configuration required. It also aims to let extension developers encapsulate code easily and avoid fragile hard dependencies. Furthermore, it aims to allow extensions to be reused across applications. MEF was introduced as a part of .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.
Unsupported, pre-release versions of MEF are also available on CodePlex along with source code and can be used, albeit unsupported and with limitations, on version 3.5 of the framework.
MEF aims to solve the runtime extensibility problem. Without MEF, any application that wants to support a plugin model needs to create its own infrastructure from scratch. Those plugins will often be application-specific and cannot be reused across multiple implementations.
Roughly speaking, MEF's core consists of a catalog and a CompositionContainer. A catalog is responsible for discovering extensions and the container coordinates creation and satisfies dependencies.
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