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: ...

In my experience working with Silverlight applications, probably one of the most underused features I've witnessed is the ability to abstract application-level functionality using the IApplicationService and IApplicationLifetimeAware interfaces. This, in turn, results in the over-use (and abuse) of the Startup and Exit events in the Application ...

By now, you probably are aware that you can dynamically load XAP files using the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) within your Silverlight applications. Have you been scratching your head, however, and wondering how on earth you would actually test something like that? It is possible, and here's a quick post to show one way you can. First, ...

An example plug-in for the framework introduced at Jeremy Likness' 2010 Codestock talk

Sample application for Jeremy Likness' 2010 Codestock talk.

Slide Deck from Jeremy Likness' 2010 Codestock talk.

This week I had the pleasure of attending my first CodeStock event in Knoxville, TN. Let me start by saying it was an amazing event. I give many thanks to the attendees, for keeping it a strong and thriving community, the sponsors (including my company, Wintellect), the speakers, and of course the organizers. You can learn more about the event at ...

Presentation slide deck for a talk I gave about using the Managed Extensibility Framework for Line of Business applications in .NET 4.0.

Silverlight Out of Browser (OOB) applications are becoming more and more popular due to the convenience of being able to install and launch them locally. As Silverlight applications become larger and more composable, advanced techniques such as dynamically loading modules are also becoming more popular. The ''out of the box'' Managed ...

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 ...