New Hampshire .Net Nashua presents Kathleen Dollard

FEB 9th 6-9 PM Eaton-Richmond Center Daniel Webster College

20 University Drive, Nashua, NH

Kathleen Dollard

Kathleen is an independent consultant speaking and working around the world from her office in Northern Colorado. She has been a Microsoft MVP for 11 years and a member of the INETA Speaker’s Bureau. She’s spoken in 38 states and six countries. Kathleen specializes in compositional architectures, application code generation, and effectively using tools for effective application completion. She’s published numerous articles on a range of .NET technologies, including her “Ask Kathleen” column in Visual Studio Magazine.

Kathleen is also active in the Northern Colorado .NET SIG, Denver Visual Studio User Group, Northern Colorado Architect’s Group, and IASA Denver.

Abstract

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF)

Composable applications are made of building blocks – like Legos.

Composability is an extension of many ideas that have fueled architecture evolution in the last twenty years, including isolation, the creation of tiers, and testable applications. Silverlight and .NET now contain the Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF to provide composability. In the first part of this talk, I’ll cover what composability is and the three broad categories – extensions, fully composed applications, and architecturally composed applications. The second part of the talk dives into the technical aspects of MEF and how to use it. MEF itself is fully extensible with many possible models for defining composition parts. I’ll skip the theoretical approaches and stick with the mainstream attributed model. You’ll learn how to incorporate this attributed model into your own applications to define and retrieve parts. I’ll end the talk with by briefly covering the challenges of debugging MEF, including an introduction to stable composition and its implications. You’ll leave understanding when MEF might be a good fit for your applications today and insight into how profoundly MEF is likely to change architectures in the relatively near future.

Sponsors
Special Thanks to our good friends who made this possible.. And especially to Kathleen for volunteering

Robert Half Technologies

Daniel Webster College