Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

The Visual Studio Editor and MEF

Although the MEF is a general purpose extensibility framework applicable across a wide range of application scenarios, it is particularly applicable to extending the Visual Studio 2010 code editor for one simple reason: The editor itself was built by Microsoft using MEF. In other words, the code editor is comprised of a series of MEF parts. Adding additional parts to extend and change editor behavior is simply a matter of using the MEF design patterns and writing your own MEF parts to be discovered and used by the editor.

In Chapter 15, “Writing Add-Ins and Wizards,” during our discussion of Visual Studio Add-in development, we talked about the need to understand two pieces of information in order to be successful ...