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Welcome to the MEF Community Site

Important: this site hosts source code for unsupported, pre-release versions of MEF. If you want to use MEF in production, you should strongly consider using the supported versions included in the .NET Framework and Silverlight.

What is it?

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a composition layer for .NET that improves the flexibility, maintainability and testability of large applications. MEF can be used for third-party plugin extensibility, or it can bring the benefits of a loosely-coupled plugin-like architecture to regular applications.

Status

MEF is a part of the Microsoft .NET Framework, with types primarily under the System.ComponentModel.Composition.* namespaces.
  • MEF has shipped with .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4
  • MEF 2 is under development and can be downloaded in source code and binary form from this site

Documentation

  • Reference documentation for released versions of MEF is available on MSDN
  • For an introduction to MEF see the Hands-On Lab
  • Upcoming features are discussed on the BCL team blog
    • Release notes for MEF 2 Preview 4 are posted in this blog post
    • Release notes for MEF 2 Preview 5 are here
Last edited Dec 19 2011 at 9:36 PM by nblumhardt, version 85
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