Chapter 15. Extending the Code Editor Using Managed Extensibility Framework

In This Chapter

• The Extensibility Problem

• MEF Architecture

• The Visual Studio Editor and MEF

• Creating Your Own MEF-Based Editor Extension

You 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 introduced a brand-new technology for extending Visual Studio that has been further refined with Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5: the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF).

MEF is actually a generic architecture pattern, application programming ...

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