If you’re working on a MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework) application, you’re probably familiar with its ups and down. On the one hand, MEF is a powerful plugin system, that’s a pleasure to work with once you know it well. On the other hand, we all encountered strange failures that originated with MEF. Such failures are a nightmare to debug and identify. There are several reasons why a MEF failure might happen.

I recently had to create a Roslyn Analyzer that envelopes code in a try/catch statement. This reasoning was to prevent loading errors in any exported MEF component . Here’s the analyzer in action: The analyzer does the following: Adds a Diagnostic that finds a MEF ImportingConstructor with content that’s not entirely wrapped in a try/catch statement. Provides a Code Fix to handle the problem. The Code Fix will: Add a try/catch statement around the entire content Add ErrorNotificationLogger.