Composite Oriented Programming (COP), .NET 4.0, MEF, and the Oslo Repository

Question

There seems to have been some interest over the past year around COP within the .NET community (ala Qi4j). A few folks have rolled there own COP frameworks (see links below) and it would appear .NET 4.0's Dynamic Dispatch and MEF might have a potential role in any .NET COP framework.

On one hand a lot of this would appear to hark back to ideas from System/38 days (yes, I'm an old guy), though on the other it would also seem to be a pretty good fit with Oslo (Modeling and Repository). Can anyone comment on the whether Microsoft is doing any work on COP?

Some recent .NET COP framework efforts:

Hendry Luk - Roll Your Own COP

Yves GoEleven.com - Cop - Proof of concept

Anders Norås - Trick or Trait? Composite Oriented Programming with C#

Magnus Mårtensson - Composite Oriented Programming spike on Unity Application Block

Crary

Hi, the title is confusing, maybe it should be better worded like, for example, "Is Microsoft doing any work on COP?" – Kobayashi

COP by itself isn't the thrust of the question so much as the use of COP with the new Oslo repository. I'll have to think of how to better phrase the question, though, so thanks... – Crary

Always fun to add to really old threads -- When Rickard and I were discussing Qi4j (in 2006/2007) we needed a term to describe the concept of assembling "fragments into objects", or for that matter "assigning behviors to objects". At the time, Composite Oriented Programming had zero, yes ZERO, hits on Google, and that was chosen for that reason. After that, enough people made assumption of what it meant (from its name) and claimed that it was something else, and had been around for a long time. Well... – Manwell

Answer 1

Aku - There is considerable difference between the CAB / Composite WPF guidance and COP which is a fundamentally different approach to the expression of object behavior via the assembly of 'fragments' based on [Domain] context. The appearance of Mixins, Concerns, Constraints, and SideEffects in .NET 4.0 variously might point in that direction, but I guess I'm more specifically curious if Microsoft is by chance, or in any way, formally "doing COP" and in particular on top of the Oslo repository.

Crary

Answer 2

Can anyone comment on the whether Microsoft is doing any work on COP?

Microsoft released Composite Application Block and Composite WPF, They have DI FW (Unity). Now they are working on MEF.

What should we comment here ?

Sifuentes

Answer 3

Check MEF http://mef.codeplex.com, currently shipped inside .NET 4, more in PDC session http://microsoftpdc.com/Sessions/FT24

Dilettante