MoXAML goes MefXAML

First of all, I must apologize that it’s taken me so long to release the new version of MoXAML. Unfortunately, it’s taken a back burner to other projects that I have going on, so it’s been lower down on my priority list than I would have liked. Saying that, I have been tinkering with a new version and making changes to the internal architecture to make it easier for me to add new functionality to it. MoXAML has now got the MEF mojo underpinning it.

A feature of the original version of MoXAML that I was never happy with was the way I had to register commands so that they will appear in the menus. To be honest, the code was a complete mess and it offended my sensibilities whenever I looked at it. Well, the new version has completely changed that. I’ve added a MoXAML.Infrastructure library that provides a lot of the underpinnings of MoXAML registration; all we need to do is derive from the CommandBase class in this library and with just a couple of commands, we are good to go.

First of all, we need to add a unique command name, the menu text and the parent command that we want to show this command in. This just gets added into the constructor likes so:

public MyConstructor()
{
  CommandName = "MyUniqueCommandName";
  Caption = "Menu text";
  ParentCommandBar.Add(CommandBarType.SolutionContextMenu);
}

Now, to add the code to actually do the work, just override the Execute method and add in the functionality that you want to perform.

In a future post, I’ll cover creating an add-in from scratch and talk about the API that’s now been exposed in MoXAML. To get the latest version of MoXAML, please check it out here.