Episode 12: Glenn Block on Prism, Unity, and MEF (part 2)

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Posted in Uncategorized, podcast

This is the second half of our interview with Glenn Block. He talks about the interesting stuff he's been up to at Microsoft with Prism, Unity, and MEF (the Managed Extensibility Framework). Be sure to listen to part 1 first or Glenn's crazytalk about MEF will spin your head around. Links:

Glenn's Prism posts - http://blogs.msdn.com/gblock/archive/tags/prism/default.aspx
Prism - www.microsoft.com/compositewpf
Unity - http://msdn.microsoft.com/unity
MEF - http://blogs.msdn.com/kcwalina/archive/2008/04/25/MEF.aspx
MEF CTP - http://code.msdn.com/MEF
Look for an article on Prism in the upcoming September issue of MSDN magazine.

Download / Listen Episode 12: Glenn Block on Prism, Unity, and MEF (Part 2)

Aug 08

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 2:00 amand is filed under Uncategorized, podcast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

11 Comments Episode 12: Glenn Block on Prism, Unity, and MEF (part 2)

Brian Sullivan

August 8th, 2008 at 1:01 pm

FYI, this episode doesn’t seem to be showing up on iTunes yet (for me anyway). Something wrong with the feed?
Jon Galloway

August 8th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

Thanks, Brian. Feedburner hadn’t picked it up yet. I pinged them and it looks like it’s in the feed, so it should show up soon.
me

August 9th, 2008 at 3:23 pm

I would like to have known how this compares to the Spring.net framework. Seems to be reimplementing it but that can’t be right…
Scott

August 9th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

me: (wow, feels weird to be talking to myself)
spring.net is a suite of components, but I’m assuming that you mean the DI feature of spring.net.

Primarily, DI is not about extensibility. It’s about de-coupling you architecture. Removing some of the jumping through hoops that you have to do when programming against interfaces and making it easier. You can achieve extensibility with DI by manually wiring up your dependencies in some sort of config file or maybe a fluent interface, but you still have to tell the DI container what parts depend on what.

MEF is about wiring things up for you. You can see this in the Tetris example. To add the additional shapes to the game, all you do in the code is call catalog.addAssembly and MEF takes care of loading it into the AppDomain, finding the types in the assembly that the game is importing, and instantiating them.
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