Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Chapter 16. Extending the Code Editor Using MEF

IN THIS CHAPTER

• The Extensibility Problem 641

• MEF Architecture 642

• The Visual Studio Editor and MEF 644

• Creating Your Own MEF-Based Editor Extension 654

We have seen in the preceding two chapters that there are many different opportunities, and approaches, for extending Visual Studio functionality. The add-in model, in particular, is a powerful way to implement fairly robust applications within the Visual Studio IDE. But Visual Studio 2010 introduces a brand new technology for extending Visual Studio: the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).

MEF is actually a generic architecture pattern, API, and .NET class library for enabling easy “plug in” extensions for any .NET application. Visual ...