[Opensim-dev] Robust dynamic connector plugins...

[James Hughes]

Fortis used it and it didn't seem a lot different than the way we have 
been using mono-addins in OpenSim.exe to this point. MEF uses attributes 
to define, as does most of addins. Some things in mono-addins still need 
to be defined in the xml manafest files, but most things can be done by 
attributes. MEF supports management of local assemblies and it doesn't 
provide tools for repositories and assemblies like mono-addins. Using 
MEF would require the additional development of those tools. So, the 
feature set of mono-addins is more complete for this type of work. We 
already use mono-addins extensively in the region server and it has 
served us well. It seems that some miss-steps were made in the 
implementation and need some refactoring (possibly newer versions have 
resolved issues that caused us to have these workarounds?). But, all in 
all we have had good results and have a great deal of the work toward 
managing remote repositories and plugins in the region server done as 
well. Even if we were just dealing with local assemblies I would see no 
real technical advantage to using MEF over mono-addins.

The mono-addins project is part of the mono git-hub code and has been 
headed up by Llouis Sanchez, one of the lead Mono developers with 
Xamarin. And it is used in Monodevelop that is the IDE of their 
commercial products. So, its heritage is OK and it is actively developed.

Thanks
BlueWall

On 10/26/2012 07:32 PM, Justin Clark-Casey wrote:
> My first question is, what do you think of the alternatives to
> Mono.Addins, chiefly MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework)? How do they
> compare?
>