MEF and the Personal Spike

A week or two ago I attended the Open Space Coding day arranged by Alan Dean, and held at the Conchango offices. The Alt.Net community is very good at getting together and talking about code, software, and how it should all be done, but the focus of this meeting was to get on and write something!

The format was much like an open space conference, the first thing we did was suggest things we’d like to look in to, experiment and play with. There was a morning and afternoon session, in the morning I went to one on static reflection. A very interesting technique of using lambda syntax to analyse code as a traversable tree of expressions. All very good. Unfortunately for me this is the opportunity my Windows 2008 Server VM on my MacBook decided to bomb out on me. And bomb out it did. Blue Screen of death even before windows got a chance to get it’s boot on. How embarrassing, there was me thinking, I could finally be one of the cool kids, with my shiny white MacBook with after market Ram and HD upgrade just so I could run Windows in a VM, and it all fell apart.

From the Static reflection session I took away that it did make me a whole lot more comfortable with the reflection thing. Up until now I had always treated it like a leper of hackery, unjustly so, but this experience made me much more comfortable. It did appear to me that there was space here for a good library to make the traversal of the tree a lot more intuitive. Let me know if you know of any or if I missed something that made it all a lot easier than it looks.

The second session I attended was one on MEF. As we were all new to the format (or at least I thought we were) this got off to a bit of a slow start. We did that thing where go in to a room preped and briefed not to expect anyone to lead and then stare at someone who seems to know more than anyone else until they stand up and start presenting. Andrew Clancy, an Conchango employee, admitted to have played with MEF, and so showed us all very basically what its all about.

Once we had been briefed we paired up and made our own toy examples. I think it was a good thing that Andy’s example was out of date and the version of MEF we all downloaded was completely different. It forced us all to learn a bit better how it all worked. Mike and I quickly came up with a toy example that involved contract killers.

We quickly cut two dlls, that each contained one type of contract killer. MEF made it unbelievably easy to export this implementations of IContractKiller. Just attribute them up and they’re ready for consumption. The contract it self was also implemented in it’s own library and finally we had a console app that would tie it all together and offer up some victims to be killed (in various ways).

MEF allowed us to simply load all the dlls in a directory and in an IoC like way made them available to plug in to IContractKiller shaped holes (properties tagged with corresponding attributes). It also rather neatly allowed us to get all the implementations and put them in an IEnumerable for us to use.

Now here’s what I really learnt at this day. I knew about MEF when it was released and have seen many a blog about people using it (seen, not read). But only when I actually played with it, did it start clicking, how I could leverage this in my work. Where it might be appropriate to alleviate some problem we were having, and also where it wouldn’t be so handy. It’s very easy to get carried away with a new toy. Scott Cowan who also attended the session described this to me as a personal spike.

Take an hour or two, some time boxed period, branch your code or knock up some simple harness, and just play with something you’ve not used before. Something you’re interested in learning. With no goal other than to learn a little more about what it is you’re playing with. As is described in Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt. Learn by play really does work. It may seem obvious but reading about something really is totally different. Andy explains that it’s because it uses a different part of your brain, and that neglected part, the play part, seems to have a hidden ability. To perculate and strike you in the down time. Let your mind wander a little and it often does go find something interesting and useful!

Woo, my first post written and published in one sitting. I hope it doesn’t show (much).