Acropolis and System.Addin
I was just wondering what (if any) relationship there is between Acropolis and the CLR System.Addin team? They both seem to be attacking an extensible/pluggable architecture, but with slightly different focuses. For example, System.Addin has notions of contracts and a pipeline architecture to enable version independence of addins. Presumably, Acropolis will need to handle the same sorts of things (at least, once you get to V2 of your Acropolis part/service).
I also love the way System.Addin allows you to sandbox "services" in separate AppDomains or Processes, providing a level of isolation for components, so that one rogue component does not necessarily bring down the entire application. Is there any thought to making this capability available in Acropolis? Or, even better, providing this out-of process isolation capability for parts as well, including their views (I know, limitations of Windows applies here, but I can only dream).
Regards,
Ian
[1000 byte] By [
Dunco] at [2008-2-24]
Hi Ian,
Thanks for your feedback! To answer your first question, no, there is no direct relationship between Acropolis and the Addin team. At the end of the day the two projects are "only" loosely coupled so to speak. While the Addin team focuses on a generic and robust addin model/framework our goal is to provide an application development framework which would benefit from a System.Addin-like functionality. However, this should not suggest that different teams at MS who work on related technologies don't talk to each other. ;-) Furthermore, what you want to do is something other customers have already requested in the past and we are looking into it. Unfortunately, there is nothing more I can tell you at this point in time as we are still in the process of investigating the exact user requirements and our options for supporting the scenarios you mentioned in Acropolis.
Best regards
Dennis "D.C." Dietrich
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
To add to Dennis' comments - Yes, we indeed see Systen.AddIn as providing core functionality within Acropolis to provide isolation and versioning support for components within an Acropolis application.
Specifically, we are working on tightly integrating System.AddIn into Acropolis to let you utilize its facilities within the composition sequence for components, so you'd be able to specify whether the component should be created in a new app domain, or a new process, etc, and what contract you want to use to interact with it. The two scenarios you describe are the ones we are trying to target. The isolation of non visual components is much easier because of the restrictions of the UI stack, so we expect to be able to tackle that one pretty easily. We're not sure how far we'll get on the other scenario though...
