Welcome to the MEF Community Site
Important: this site hosts source code for
unsupported, pre-release versions of MEF. If you want to use MEF in production, you should strongly consider using the supported versions included in
the .NET Framework and
Silverlight.
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.
Status
MEF is a part of the Microsoft .NET Framework, with types primarily under the
System.ComponentModel.Composition.* namespaces. There are two versions of MEF
- MEF has shipped with .NET 4.0 and higher and Silverlight 4. This provides the standard extension model that has been used in Visual Studio.
- MEF 2 is a lightweight version of MEF, which has been optimized for static composition scenarios and provides faster compositions. It is also the only version of MEF that is as a portable class library and can be used on phone, store, desktop and web applications. This version of MEF is available viaNuGet.