Nairooz Nilafdeen's Blog

Almost after .Net 4 was released I remember reading about MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), this was a framework for developers to compose their application with required dependencies. At first this looks like the Unity Container used for dependency injection, but MEF is much more than a dependency container but there is nothing stopping you from using MEF as a dependency injector. I remember around 5 years back when I was in a project that created a framework that allows developers to plug-in there modules as WinForm screens. The developer would create a set of screens with the intended functionalities and the drop this component in the bin folder of the framework and then will move on to do some painful configurations for the framework to pick up the module. Dropping the component into the bin folder and doing a bit of configuration is all that s needed for the framework to pick up display the screens. Typically, the configurations would also contain metadata about the screen....

One of the key features in .Net 4.5 is to write asynchronous programs much easier. So if I was to write asynchronous programs in .Net 2.0/3.5, I would either follow the event based model or the callback based model. For an example, a synchronous method that does intensive work (say the DoWork()) can be made asynchronous by using the following patterns 1) Implementing the IAsyncResult pattern. in this implementation, 2 methods are exposed for the DoWork() synchronous method, the BeginDoWork() and the EndDoWork() method. The user will call the BeingDoWork() passing in the required parameters and a callback of the delegate type AsyncCallback(IAsyncResult). The BeginDoWork() will spawn a new thread a return control back to the user. Once work is completed in the spawned method, as a last step, it will call the inform the AsyncResult implementation, which in turns will call the EndDoWork() (which is the callback that was passed in to the BeginDoWork()). 2) Implementing the event pattern. ...