Microsoft Announces Extensibility Framework for .NET

• By Becky Nagel
• 04/29/08

Last week, Microsoft's .NET Framework program manager Krzysztof Cwalina announced that his team is working on a new framework for .NET--Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)--designed to improve compatibility with third-party extensions.

"In the absence of a built-in extensibility framework (like MEF), our developers who want to enable such extensions often are forced to create custom mechanisms, thus duplication," Cwalina wrote in his blog post announcing the project. "We hope that MEF will both stop such duplication and encourage/enable more extensibility in the Framework and applications built on top of it."

According to Cwalina, MEF currently consists of three technologies that work together: a Dependency Injection (DI) framework, a naming and activation service, and a "duck typing" structural type system. The team is working with the Unity framework as well as the DI community to develop MEF, Cwalina wrote.

Cwalina said that a ship date for the project is not yet known.

Cwalina's team is seeking input from developers on what they'd like to see in MEF. For more information on the project, including selected code samples, click here.