Choosing between MEF and MAF (System.AddIn)

Question

The Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and Managed AddIn Framework (MAF, aka System.AddIn) seem to accomplish very similar tasks. According to this Stack Overflow questio

Answer 1

In my view the two technologies actually target very different use cases.

MEF is typically best in a pure dependency injection scenario where the person or group delivering the final integrated solution is assembling everything and vouching for the overall integrity but has a need to have different implementations of key capabilities.

MAF is for a scenario where someone/group is developing a platform or host and other groups will add capabilities after the fact and in a way not under the control of the host group. In this scenario the need is for more elaborate mechanisms to "protect" the host from rogue add-ins (or to protect add-ins from each other).

A third similar-in-pattern technology is the whole ProviderBase scheme. This also enables replacing a capability but its goal is really the scenario where the host/app absolutely needs a capability and the need is really to specify different implementations via config.