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How practical is using the MEF pipeline in your application for a add-in/plug-in environment?

If, for example I want to create a basic reporting base class, then extend the functionality using some kind of add-in setup (like the MEF pipeline), how practical is it to use it in this setup?

I haven't many applications using this model (if someone has a list of commercial software using this I'd be interested to check it out)

Ourx
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1 Answers1

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How practical is using the MEF pipeline in your application for a add-in/plug-in environment?

i use MEF all the way for my loosly coupled applications.

What is it? The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a composition layer for .NET that improves the flexibility, maintainability and testability of large applications. MEF can be used for third-party plugin extensibility, or it can bring the benefits of a loosely-coupled plugin-like architecture to regular applications.

btw PRSIM can be used with MEF, but there are a lot of other examples in the www.

blindmeis
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  • can you use multiple add-in types using the one pipeline i.e. if i want add-ins for reporting and add-ins for calculations is this possible? – Ourx Jan 06 '12 at 01:47
  • you should look at the MEF documentation. and of course you can have multiple add-in([ImportMany] is your friend then) – blindmeis Jan 06 '12 at 06:15
  • thanks.. any clues on my other question regarding the AddInStore class and being able to specify the directories and .dll files of the pipeline? – Ourx Jan 06 '12 at 09:24