A few weeks ago I had the idea of taking the current documentation on the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) Codeplex site and creating a PDF that I could read on my Kindle DX to learn MEF. I did the next obvious thing and tweeted about the document for MEF Development I just created. I was surprised how many people asked for the document and if I could send it to them. I uploaded it to my personal site here. A few days later I was in discussions with Glenn Block, one of the masterminds behind MEF, about leading the drive to produce for users of MEF a new platform to share community knowledge. It has not sunk in what I got myself into until now.

I am very excited to be working with a great team of people to push MEF knowledge to a wider audience. I want to thank my teammates from the MEF development and documentation teams that will be working with me and Jeremy Likness to get this vision to become a reality.

• Andreas Håkansson
• Glenn Block
• Piotr Wlodek
• Jeremy Likness

So what will we be creating for the MEF Contrib Codeplex site? In the end we will have a wider variety of documentation that people can not only read and learn from but can contribute right away with their own knowledge and insights. here is what we will be bringing to the MEF community:

MEF documentation

We will be taking the documentation from the current MEF Codeplex site and moving it to the MEF Contrib site for further enhancements. Over the next few months our team will be updating the documentation and will release it to the community. We will be taking snapshots of the work and releasing betas of the documents for community review.

Knowledge Base

The Doc Team will be gathering all MEF blog posts, articles, video tutorials, screencasts and other online content and organizing a Knowledge Base for people to look through and learn from. We will be setting up some type of way to accept new content to include in the Knowledge Base. This area is still be defined and more information will come when we have a tight vision.

Quickstarts

One of the best ways for developers to learn not only MEF but any new development tool or library is to just do it. We on the Doc Team could not agree more and will be creating a set of Quickstarts for people to learn MEF from a beginner level knowledge to more advanced topics. These will be in the form of a document that walks a developer through the demo and the start and finish source for the demo project.

If you have ideas on what you would like to see from our Quickstarts please contact myself or Jeremy Likness.

Glossary/Vocabulary

An area I like to learn for any new technology is the vocabulary the community speaks when working and discussing with others using the tools/libraries. For people like myself we will also create a list of terms used in developing applications with MEF, a definition for the term along with a link to other places in the Documentation Project to see more details.

FAQ

Finally we will be creating a FAQ to answer the questions that the MEF team are frequently asked around why they created MEF and what problems they see it solving.

We are hoping in the next week to begin getting further details to our madness for the MEF Contrib Documentation Project out to the community. I really appreciate the support of Glenn and the entire MEF product team at Microsoft along with Andreas Håkansson who I have spoken to every evening.