Introducing .NET 4.0: with Visual Studio 2010

2.5. MEF

Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new framework for creating customizable applications that can be used by any .NET-compatible language. Glenn Block (PM for the new MEF in .NET 4.0) says the following:

Quite simply, MEF makes building extensible apps, libraries, and frameworks easy. It shares some common characteristics of other frameworks out there, but it also addresses a whole new set of problems that arise in building extremely large scalable extensible systems.

http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/2008/09/26/what-is-the-managed-extensibility-framework.aspx

Let's say you have created a Tetris application and want to allow users to extend it by creating their own shapes of bricks. MEF enables you to do this by defining a ...