I've been building enterprise applications for more than a decade now, and have specialized in Silverlight line of business applications for the past several years. The term ''enterprise'' seems to inspire images of complex, large, difficult-to-maintain software systems but a well-written system doesn't have to suffer from the extra complexity. ...

After having worked on several major projects that integrated the Managed Extensibility Framework, I thought it might be beneficial to share a retrospective on how it was used what value it provided. These are all ways MEF helped my team build modular Silverlight applications. Unlike my earlier post that covered 10 Reasons to use the Managed ...

Published another quickstart. This is an introductory quickstart for the Managed Extensibility Framework, and is similar to the previous one except that it is specific to Silverlight. You can take a look at the article and watch the short video by clicking here.

I've been doing quite a bit with Reactive Extensions (Rx) for Silverlight lately. One idea that I keep exploring is the concept of creative intuitive sequential workflows for asynchronous operations. You can read about my explorations using Wintellect's own Power Threading Library in this post along with a simple solution using an interface and ...

I've been working with the Reactive Extensions (Rx) library quite a bit lately and am very impressed. While it is a new way of thinking about services, it certainly makes life much easier. In this example, I'll show you a way to simplify your web service calls using Rx. In fact, even if you don't use Reactive Extensions, you may benefit from the ...

I've been working on quickstarts for a community team that I'm a member of. The team is called MEFContrib. We write extensions to the Managed Extensibility Framework as well as supporting manuals and documentation. I've been tasked with the quickstarts and as I release them I'll post them for you. Obviously, a quickstart should be, well, quick, ...

It is very common to have base classes and interfaces that use generic types to define standard behaviors across business applications. One challenge with the Managed Extensibility Framework is that it doesn't directly support generic exports and imports: in other words, there is no way to effectively do the following: ...

During my talk about the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) at Devscovery this past week, I had two very good questions asked by the audience and promised I'd get an answer. The first one was about exporting in MEF. I was under the impression that a MEF part could have one export, but I was mistaken. The confusion came from this thread which ...

One question I'm commonly asked is, ''Why do I need the Managed Extensibility Framework? How do I know when to use it?'' In addition to that really being two questions, I'm not sure I can tell you the top ten reasons to use MEF or whether or not it is the right tool for you. Instead, as a hands-on consultant who has been using MEF in production ...

Over the past few weeks I've been exploring the concept of region management using the Managed Extensibility Framework, and for a good reason. I'm working on a project that has several different regions and controls that must be managed effectively and across the boundaries of dynamic XAP files in Silverlight 3. Sound like a mouthful? In ...