There has been quite a lot going on behinds the scenes lately and I am finally able to share some of it with you! Existing stuff! New home, new shoes and new friends – what more does an open-source project really need? Read on to know what!

Our new home

For quite a while we have been talking about moving MefContrib for a couple of reasons. We have all been wanting to put some effort into learning Git more extensivly , so what better way than to move our entire repository from subversion to git? That is right, we have moved our repository from our Codeplex site to our new home at Github! Granted we are by no means Git experts, but we hope we will get there a bit sooner thanks to this, he he.

But one of the main reasons we wanted to move over to Github was because of the awesome tools they have in place to help out to work with community contributions. From the contributors perspective it is so incredibly easy to fork a repository, make some changes and then issue a pull request back to the main repository. Likewise, from the project owners perspective it is easy to keep track of forks and to merge contributions into the main repository.

And before you ask, yes we did talk about switching to Mercurial, especially after the native Mercurial support was rolled out on Codeplex. I work with Mercurial on nearly a daily basis at work and I love it, however we still felt that we wanted to take on the (albeit small) challenge of properly teaching ourselves Git and also take advantage of the awesome track record Github has of infusing community activity into open-source software.

If you do not have any prior Git experience yourself but still want to contribute, do not worry! We invite you along on our Git-learning journey and we will soon have the obligatory “This is how you work with our repository” information posted at our Github crib.

Our new shoes

The move to Github also marks another important change in the life of MefContrib. We have now completely upgraded the code to be compatible with .Net 4, Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010! We are looking forward to being able to make use of all the new functionality that this brings to the table. A lot of people we have talked to about contributions have been building their stuff on the .Net 4 preview bits, so hopefully this means we will be able to get some of them into our repository in the future.

Further more we have decided to discontinue support for .Net 3.5, Silverlight 3 and Visual Studio 2008. We are going to make one final binary and source drop that targets the old platforms, but after that we will only be putting new features into the repository. This was not an easy decision to make but after taking a poll on what framework version people would be building MEF powered applications on, it stood clear that the vast majority would be targeting the newer version.

If there is demand for a .Net 3.5, Silverlight 3 and Visual Studio 2008 version and it is large enough, then we would probably reevaluate our decision. In the meantime the old version will still be available as a binary and source code drop, as well as the repository will be kept online. And as any open-source project would say; We accept patches!

Our new friends

If you have checked out our Github home by now (no? What are you waiting for?) you are likely to have spotted another change. We have added a couple of other repositories to our repertoire. We felt that we needed to keep a couple of things separate from each other so this is what we have got so far

• MefContrib; Contains extensions to the Managed Extensibility Framework
• MefContrib-Samples; Will contains sample applications on how to use MefContrib and possibly MEF
• MefContrib-Tools; Here we will put tools that you can use with MEF, such as visualizers

We might be adding one or two more down the road, such as for our upcoming guides and docs, but do not worry, the distinction between all of them will be crystal clear!

Our future

… is in your hands, literally. We need your awesome contributions (we know they exist, the blogsphere is exploding with MEF contents right now!), we need your help to spread the word (social media for the win!), we need your feedback on what works, what does not working, what is missing and what is useless! In short, we need our community, just like any other open-source software. Are you with us?!