Designing Silverlight Business Applications: Best Practices for Using Silverlight Effectively in the Enterprise

8. The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

MODULAR APPLICATIONS ARE KEY for building highly extensible, maintainable, and testable Silverlight LOB applications. Although the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern provides clean separation of concerns, it doesn’t address how to take the decoupled code and piece it together. Highly decoupled code can often appear like a jigsaw puzzle with scattered components that the developer must figure out how to fit together. The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a built-in library that ships with the runtime and helps put the pieces together to create the bigger picture.

One of the first blog posts that mentioned MEF was written on April 25, 2008 by Microsoft team member Kryszstof Cwalina: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kcwalina/archive/2008/04/25/mef.aspx ...