Glenn is the PM for the new Managed Extensibility Framework in .NET 4.0. Prior to Microsoft, he worked for 10 years in various startups and ISVs wearing many different hats all related to developing software. Glenn has been writing code practically since the time he learned how to ride a bicycle. When he's not writing code, he's working on ways to build better software through learning good software design principles and methodologies. Glenn is a geek at heart and spends a good portion of the rest of this time spreading that geekdom through conferences, and the community through groups such as ALT.NET. When he's not working and playing with technology, he spends his time with his wife and four year old daughter either at their Seattle apartment or at one of the local coffee shops.

Are you building complex enterprise applications with WPF? Once you get past the initial twilight period of amazement at WPF's power, you'll quick arrive a set of real problems that the WPF books might not answer. How can you partition that application into separately evolving pieces that can be developed and tested by separate teams. How can you introduce new components in the UI without breaking the entire system? How can you support complex interactions and transactions across the different UI components without having the code become a tangled un-maintainable mess? How can you build the system in a unit-testable manner? If any of these questions apply to you, come to this session and find out about the new Composite Application Guidance that we recently shipped in patterns & practices. We'll look at core aspects of the guidance and the types of systems you'll build using it. We'll also explore how you can incrementally adopt the capabilities that make sense for you rather than being forced to "take the whole kitchen sink."

Modern applications are often built from pluggable parts composed together either at development time or at runtime. Such parts might include reusable libraries, application add-ins, host provided services, or internal parts separated from the main application for engineering reasons; The .NET framework currently provides basic functionality for loading such parts, but it does not provide a built-in mechanism for discovering and composing them. The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) is a new .NET Framework technology designed to enable development of parts and applications composed from such parts. This session will cover the basic MEF usage scenarios and architecture.