When: Wednesday 2nd June 2010, doors open 6:00pm, meeting starts 6:30pm

Where: UWE (University of the West of England), Frenchay, Bristol (see FAQ for directions and a map) - Room 2q49

What: A Guided Tour of the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) in Silverlight 4

Who: Mike Taulty, Microsoft Developer Evangelist and my favourite speaker on the UK circuit: professional, honest and brilliant.

Why: Because MEF is one technology that pervades all .NET development - you need to be aware of this as one of the possible choices for your solution. Also because Mike is brilliant. I mean honestly you should come to this one if only to study a master of presentation skills.

How do I sign up for this meeting: Log in to the site, go to the Meetings page and on the top right hand side you will see a box "Register For A Meeting". Select the month in the drop down and then click on the Register link.

Abstract:
Silverlight 4 has a new framework that can help in building loosely-coupled and extensible applications – the Managed Extensibility Framework or MEF. MEF’s key ability is to flexibly compose an application out of a set of component parts that describe the functionality they expose and the functionality that they depend upon. MEF has the ability to discover components without the need for up-front registration and is extensible in many, many ways. In this session we’ll do a tour around MEF to look at what it does for you, how it does it and how you can use and extend it in your own Silverlight applications.

Bio:
Mike Taulty works in the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft in the UK where he has spent the past few years helping developers understand and get the best from the Microsoft platform. Prior to this, Mike spent 3 years with Microsoft Consulting Services as a consultant on developer technologies.

Before joining Microsoft, Mike spent the previous 9 years working as a software developer for a number of enterprises, consultancies and software vendors working with a variety of operating system, client, communication and server technologies. You can find more of a complete career history over on LinkedIn.

Mike holds a BSc Hons (1st Class) in Computer Science from the University of Leeds.