Welcome to the MEF Community Site
Important: this site hosts source code for both
MEF which ships as the part of the .NET framework which ships in box and is not portable
the portable revision of MEF available on NuGet.
What is it?
The
Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a composition layer for .NET that improves the flexibility, maintainability and testability of large applications. MEF can be used for third-party plugin extensibility, or it can bring the benefits of a loosely-coupled
plugin-like architecture to regular applications.
Status
MEF is a part of the Microsoft .NET Framework, with types primarily under the
System..Composition. namespaces. There are two versions of MEF
- System.ComponentModel.Composition.* which has shipped with .NET 4.0 and higher and Silverlight 4. This provides the standard extension model that has been used in Visual Studio. The documentation for this version of MEF can be found
here
- System.Compostion.*_ is a lightweight version of MEF, which has been optimized for static composition scenarios and provides faster compositions. It is also the only version of MEF that is as a portable class library and can be used on phone, store, desktop
and web applications. This version of MEF is available via
NuGet and is documentation is available
here