ICommand discovery with MEF
Sometimes you are in ViewModel X and you want to execute a command on ViewModel Y. You do not want to link the 2 because of some constrains that that might impose. How can you leverage MEFs capabilities to overcome such a situation?
Easy have the ViewModel Y expose the command as a property just like you would have it for binding from the View, but also add an Export attribute on the property and give it a name
Now from ViewModel X simple imports the ICommand by specifying that same name (yes you can have the string as a constant, also I would advice to use constants to avoid conflicts in strings)
MEF will automatically get the command from ViewModel Y into ViewModel X for you. This works very nicely with MEFedMVVM since MEFedMVVM resolves all ViewModels via MEF thus you do not need to do anything to resolve the ViewModel or anything. You simply decorate the properties for Export and Import and viola you can start drinking beer 
Happy coding
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This would probably not work if both the view models are marked as NonShared
MEF is great for modular application development.
have you head about it in the Prism?
I do not know what you mean…
Say you have two viewmodels
[Export]
[PartCreationPolicy(CreationPolicy.NonShared)]
pub class ViewModel1
{
[Export("VM1Command")]
public ICommand VM1Command {get; set;}
}
[Export]
[PartCreationPolicy(CreationPolicy.NonShared)]
pub class ViewModel2
{
[ImportingConstructor]
public ViewModel2([Import("VM1Command")] ICommand vm1Command) {}
}
Now assume ViewModel1 and ViewModel2 get created and they are bound to say View1 and View2.
When ViewModel2 is being created it sees that it needs to import the VM1Command from ViewModel1, and it ends up creating a new instance of ViewModel1 (goes into ViewModel1′s constructor). So now when you try to call vm1Command from ViewModel2 it will execute that command on the new instance of ViewModel1, which is actually not the one bound to View1.