MEF & Silverlight 4 Beta - Part 3, Catalogs

Posted By: Mike Taulty | Dec 31st, 2009 @ 2:27 AM | 39,719 Views | 3 Comments

Part 3 of a series of screencasts looking at the new Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in the Silverlight 4 beta.

MEF is a framework that simplifies the design of extensible applications and components. It can flexibly and dynamically discover a set of loosely coupled components and analyse their dependencies in order to compose them together at run time.

In this screencast, we start to take a look at catalogs which provide one way in which MEF discovers the components that it can compose. We take a look at the catalogs built into the framework and what they do for us and also how MEF uses them to populate a default CompositionContainer & how you can take control of that.

Tips for viewing:

  • Each video in this series has a 3.5 minute standard introductory "header" on it so once you have seen that header you may like to skip it on subsequent videos
  • For the time pressured - I find that I speak so slowly that you can speed me up to approximately 1.5-2.0 times normal speed and still listen comfortably.

I'm working to get together a Live Meeting in early 2010 with people from the MEF team in order that people can chat more about MEF in Silverlight. Stay tuned.

The next screencast in this series is here.
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#Jan 3rd @ 12:14 AM
samcov
samcov
Which pill did I take?

Mike, this one was the eye opener for me.  Not so much about MEF, but on a whole raft of technologies coming out of Microsoft.

 

MEF, Unity, and a few other things are ALL solutions built around this simple concept... type catalogs!

 

While they all sit on this base, they set out to achieve different things, and solve problems in their particular domain.

 

At first my biggest confusion was which product to use, since MEF and Unity solved an overlapping set of problems, but I didn't see the commonality, which is they use type catalogs to provide a mapping of types to be delivered anywhere in your application.  Of course that's a simplified description of what they do, but at least I've resolved why they appear the same(at least in my warped mind).

 

Thanks!

#Jan 3rd @ 11:17 PM
Soviut
Soviut

Excellent video.  The flow is nice and brisk, all the examples are set up well and I never found myself getting bored.  Kudos for the additional visual materials like the notepad titling.  It does a far better job of keeping the viewer's attention than staring at the desktop the whole time.

#Feb 28th @ 11:08 AM
Aaron1
Aaron1

Really great job, Mike, thanks!  I really enjoy how you dig into the framework so the average developer is educated and not blinded by the abstraction.  I really enjoy watching all of your presentations and look forward to seeing more!

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