Microsoft’s DI … Unity or MEF… will there be a big change?

Not long ago (early April), P&P team just released the Unity as a lightweight, extensible dependency injection (DI) container, it facilitates building loosely coupled applications… CodePlex site is here http://codeplex.com/unity

Last week, Microsoft’s .NET Framework program manager Krzysztof Cwalina announced that his team is working on a new framework for .NET — Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) — designed to improve compatibility with third-party extensions. It seems that the .NET Framework group may take over the DI space from the P&P group… The followings are from K’s site: “The work we are doing builds on several existing Microsoft technologies (like the Unity framework) and with feedback from the DI community. The relationship with the Unity team is the regular relationship between the P&P group and the .NET Framework group where we trickle successful technologies and ideas from the P&P team into the .NET Framework after they have passed the test of time.”

MEF have much bigger scope than just he DI space, both Brad Adrams and Krzysztof will blog more details about MEF in upcoming months, but here are some early details (subject to changes, of course): “MEF is a set of features referred in the academic community and in the industry as a Naming and Activation Service (returns an object given a “name”), Dependency Injection (DI) framework, and a Structural Type System (duck typing). These technologies (and other like System.AddIn) together are intended to enable the world of what we call Open and Dynamic Applications, i.e. make it easier and cheaper to build extensible applications and extensions.”