In last few months i have been looking into a number of technologies, methodologies and tricks on how i can design and expedite the development of the EMR software. Some of the critical success factors of this EMR were extensibility because the institution has a huge research component and many research studies have various requirements and new ones come through anytime. Therefore, the EMR architecture is supposed to allow the developer to simply create a plug-in using a VS template and simply add his/her new business objects and compile it and add it to the plug-in folder so it can be loaded by the shell application at runtime.
We also used the Krypton Suite for our user interface. We bought the with source, and we modified the components so that they expose the KryptonRibbonGroup, KryptonRibbon, KryptonRibbonTab and KryptonRibbonRecentDoc. These make it easy for us to create ribbon elements in plug-ins and the shell application will register them at runtime automatically.
While i was doing my research i stumbled on the managed Extensibility Framework (http://www.codeplex.com/MEF) from Microsoft, and think it is really cool. I particularly like that fact that you can use metadata(attributes) to define dependencies in your architecture and those get satisfied at runtime. There is also more stuff on http://www.codeplex.com/MEFContrib that is interesting about MEF.
In the next couple of weeks i will be frequently blogging about my experiences in working with my custom plug-in framework and my understanding of MEF why i think it has a place in the future of software applications that need to evolve. I will also put my thoughts around what i think would be good as cosmetics or syntactic sugar in MEF and features that i think are vital for my kind of applications.
Cheers!