The principle purpose of MEF is extensibility; to serve as a ‘plug-in’ framework for when the author of the application and the author of the plug-in (extension) are different and have no particular knowledge of each other beyond a published interface (contract) library. Another problem space MEF addresses that’s different from the usual IoC suspects, … Read more
I have accepted Alastair Maw’s answer, as it was his suggestion and links that led me to a workable solution, but I am posting here some details of exactly what I did, for anyone else who may be trying to achieve something similar. As a reminder, in its simplest form my application comprises three assemblies: … Read more
I haven’t found a really comprehensive page, but there are a few: Microsoft Docs Simple Example from a msdn blog Code Project’s Introduction to MEF (part 1) MEF 101 part A from Geek with Blogs MEF 101 part B Another MSDN blog, a little more history than tutorial
When boiled down, the main difference is that IoC containers are generally most useful with static dependencies (known at compile-time), and MEF is generally most useful with dynamic dependencies (known only at run-time). As such, they are both composition engines, but the emphasis is very different for each pattern. Design decisions thus vary wildly, as … Read more
I have worked on a project that had similar pluggable architecture like the one you described and it used the same technologies ASP.NET MVC and MEF. We had a host ASP.NET MVC application that handled the authentication, authorization and all requests. Our plugins(modules) were copied to a sub-folder of it. The plugins also were ASP.NET … Read more
I’ve been evaluating these options and here’s the conclusion that I came to. MAF is a true addon framework. You can separate your addons completely, even running them inside a separate app domain so that if an addon crashes, it won’t take down your application. It also provides a very complete way of decoupling the … Read more
As mentioned in the question’s comments, differing .NET Framework versions between the projects can cause this. Check your new project’s properties to ensure that a different default version isn’t being used.