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However, for the "common man", nuclear physics is only important because it makes your lights turn on when you flick the light switch. With MEF, we will use it to simply load a .xap file that contains a Silverlight application. Trust me, it can do a lot more, but MEF is in a state like the Visual State Manager was years ago, powerful but hard to use, so you may decide to wait for more advanced tooling to appear before implementing some of it's other functions.

You may have heard about MEF and how great it is. However, you may find it a bit confusing and hard to follow. Fear not. This article is designed for you! The goal here is to give you a quick easy win. You will be able to understand this one. You will come away with something you can use, and you will be able to tell your fellow colleagues, "MEF? yeah I'm using that, good stuff".

The full article is here: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/silverlight/MEFDynamicLoading.aspx

Feel free to use this plugin as you like. It is a simple plug in that shows information about the Twitter user right inline with the Tweet. This post will explain what the Sticky plugin does and of course I’ll share the plugin with you. I’ll follow up with another post to explain how to create a plugin using the Seesmic Desktop platform, Visual Studio 2010, and Expression Blend.

This MEF catalog behaves like the DeploymentCatalog with a few exceptions. First, it will save any XAP file to isolated storage whenever it retrieves one, and second, if the application is OOB and offline, it will automatically load the XAPs from isolated storage instead of trying to fetch them from the web.

Instead of building my own catalog from scratch, I decided to cheat a little bit and use some of the existing catalogs "under the covers."

One of my favourite features in WPF is the ability to have it automagically wire up a databound object (often a ViewModel) to a particular DataTemplate. A lot of people really miss this feature when using Silverlight as it's still missing from the latest version (Silverlight 4 at the time of writing).

Folk have blogged a number of bespoke solutions, including one by my colleague Rob Garfoot: Flexible Data Template Support in Silverlight.

This sample application is the result of my initiative to learn Silverlight and WCF RIA Services. With my background of using WPF and MVVM for the past several years, I found that there is a lack of sample LOB applications that can combine the latest Silverlight enhancements with MVVM. This three part article series is my effort at creating such a sample. The choice of an issue tracking application comes from David Poll's PDC09 talk, and the design architecture is from Shawn Wildermuth's blog posts.

Microsoft Extensibility Framework or MEF is one of the great features in Silverlight, designed around making Silverlight applications more extensible generally and provides a much more complete story for the separation of concerns. MEF then begs the question 'Why we care?' and 'What can MEF really do?' and we will address that here.

For a while we’ve been getting a number of requests to have some MEF samples in VB. Let me first apologize as it’s been something I’ve been meaning to do for a very long time. To partially redeem myself, I’ve gone ahead and ported my Hello MEF sample which I demonstrated at PDC and had a small blog series on. BTW, I won’t blame you if you are not ready to forgive me for not showing VB love earlier. ;-)

The “app” (If you squint you might think it’s a real app :-) ) is an illustration of building a pluggable dashboard with MEF. The sample illustrates a ton of concepts around MEF, but the app itself is quite simple to grock.

The Silverlight HVP poses the challenge of accommodating the different functional requirements that different audiences will want built into or added onto the player. Further, we know that if the Silverlight HVP is a success the requirements will evolve over time as the player is adopted and adapted in unanticipated ways.

The samples contain the following topics:

• Simple composition using the CompositionInitializer;
• Multiple Exports;
• Metadata;
• Custom Attributes;
• Dynamic object creation with ExportFactory [...]