IT.Wox, always

"The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) simplifies the creation of extensible applications. MEF offers discovery and composition abilities that you can leverage to load application extensions." - (mef.codeplex.com)

How to get them both working together, is as below.

NOTE: I am assuming that the reader is aware of Dependency Injection pattern & the Common Service Locator.

The Steps:

1. Download the CommonServiceLocator_MefAdapter.4.0.zip file & extract the MefServiceLocator class written by Glen Block
2. Create a new ASP.Net MVC 2.0 Web Application Project
3. Include the MefServiceLocator class into this project
4. Open the Global.asax.cs file
5. Make the following code change in the Application_Start event:
   protected void Application_Start(){
   RegisterDIContainer();
   AreaRegisteration.RegisterAllAreas();
   RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
   }
6. Write the RegisterDIContainer method as:
   protected void RegisterDIContainer(){
   var catalog = new AggregateCatalog(
   new AssemblyCatalog(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly()),
   new DirectoryCatalog(Server.MapPath("~/Plugins"))
   );
   var composition = new CompositionContainer(catalog);
   composition.ComposeParts(this);
   var mef = new MefServiceLocator(composition);
   ServiceLocator.SetLocatorProvider(() => mef);
   }
7. With this in place, you are now good to do:
   var controllers = ServiceLocator.Current.GetAllInstances<IController>();

Code on...

Ladies & Gentlemen, presenting my first open-source application called WebsiteManager - finally released & ready for you good folks to use!

This version (v1.0) provides a UI to manage the ASP.Net Memberships & roles via a web application using ASP.Net MVC 3.5 (although you could use it on ASP.Net MVC 2.0 also)

I have a couple of useful ideas which I plan to implement in this application during the course of the new few releases.

So hang tight :)

Please feel free to download the latest bits from CodePlex, use it as you see fit.

I would truly appreciate some feedback on this effort & open to any new ideas you would like to see put into the future releases.

Again - CodePlex is the place for all this information. Have fun!

Typically, new developers to ASP.Net MVC get stumped with having to deal with one important fact: Page.ResolveUrl(...); is missing!!!

Don't worry or fret - the new way of doing this is:Url.Content(...);

Some sample usage is as below:

Resolving images:

<img src="<%= Url.Content("~/content/images/myImage.gif") %>" alt="My image" title="My image" />

Resolving JavaScript files:

<script language="javascript" type="text\javascript" src="<%= Url.Content("~/scripts/myscript.js") %>"></script>

Simple as that.

When you refer stylesheet files in your *.Master page, this link is directly reference without needing to use the Url helper as shown above.

So, you can continue refering stylesheet files like:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text\css" media="screen" href="../content/site.css" />

The MVC framework will resolve the path correctly at run-time.

Hmm.