Summary

The focus for this chapter was on getting you to a point where you could use MEF to modularize your application, and download the modules separately from the “shell application.” This provides a much better loading experience for the user, as they won't need to wait for the entire application to be downloaded before they can start using it. As modules are downloaded, MEF will make them available to the shell application, and the user can then start using the functionality that they provide. (Note: We'll take this a step further in the “Downloading Modules on Demand Using MEF” section of Chapter 17, and enable these modules to be downloaded on demand. We'll look at using MEF in tandem with the Navigation Framework, such that when the user navigates to a view in a module not previously downloaded, MEF will go ahead and download the module, and then display the requested view to the user.)

We've really only just touched the surface of MEF's capabilities here, but you can find more information in the documentation section of MEF's CodePlex site: http://mef.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Guide.