MEF has shipped!!!

You might have missed it, but a few weeks ago MEF V1 shipped in .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 ! As a team we’re really happy to have seen MEF hit the wild. We believe MEF helps you to build better applications that are easier to extend. To get started with MEF, go visit our wiki here

So far we’ve been hearing lots of goodness from customers that they feel the same. We’ve also been really happy seeing a healthy set of projects in the open source community pulling in MEF to address their extensibility challenges within their frameworks and applications. We’ve also had some interesting ports of MEF which is a great outcome of having an OSS license!

Below is a list of some of the folks internal and external to Microsoft that are using MEF along with the scenarios for which they use/support us (in a completely random order)

Visual Studio 2010
  • New extensible editor
  • Project system uses MEF under the covers
  • VS Ultimate uses MEF for it’s UML designers
  • Several other teams like EF use MEF for their designers
MEF Contrib
  • Community driven extensions to MEF
Silverlight Analytics Framework
  • Allows plugging in different analytic engines through MEF
Silverlight Media Framework
  • Uses MEF for plugging in various extensions relating to the player
TypeMock Test Lint
  • Uses MEF for allowing you to plug in your own custom rules
RavenDB
  • Uses MEF to allow plugging in triggers
Caliburn
  • Supports plugging in MEF as a service provider
Common Service Locator
  • Provides an adapter for working with MEF
MefedMVVM
  • MEF handles discovery and wire up of View Models both at runtime and design time
PHPMEF
  • Yes, it’s possible, MEF for PHP :-)
PocketMEF
  • MEF for PocketPC
Mono
  • Yes you heard it right, MEF 3.5 joins MVC2, System.Dynamic and OData client as part of the mono.

MEF V1 has been an awesome ride. The best part has been the fantastic community that worked with us every step of the way giving us continual feedback and ensuring our success as well as our internal partners who pressed hard on us to keep us honest. Thank you for all your help and support!

I also want to thank my team for the fantastic work they did. It was an amazing experience building MEF together!

Sit tight, MEF v2 is on the way!