C# Pluggable Architecture, Consideration for a dissertation [closed]

Question

I am beginning a Software Engineering dissertation in which I have a dental practice as a client who I will be developing software for. The client has issues of requirements and the current software is constantly upgraded through patches.

Im trying to argue the idea that the underlying requirements are bad, and to develop a new piece of software that is able to mould to meet changes. I also want the software to be generic so it could be deployed to various dental practices who could customize it to toggle particular features on.

The idea I have is to consider each feature as a plugin. This way the application should simply host the enabled plugins and they could be toggled on/off, and upgraded invidually without the need of a hard change to the application.

I would appreciate if you could help me with the following questions I have:

Is this a good approach? Is there a .NET framework already that caters for this well? Are there any significant problems I should be aware of?

Sorry for the big intro guys, and I appreciate any response I get at all. Many thanks Mike

Answer 1

The Managed Extensibility Framework is built into .NET 4.0, and is available from CodePlex as a dll for earlier versions.

Answer 2

I know MEF as MS recomended framework for pluggable aplications, but maybe some IoC framework can helps you also. Recommended by MS is Unity (developed under Microsoft Patterns and Praciticies) unity on codeplex