Developing an OSGi-like service platform for .NET

The OSGi specification defines a Java-based service platform for dynamically deploying services into networked environments. OSGi technology originally targeted home services gateways, but is now used as a general Java application extensibility mechanism. The main abilities contributing to its growing influence are its support of a dynamic service deployment life cycle and its amenability to remote management. Microsoft's .NET platform, in some ways, improves upon the Java platform, but it still lacks explicit support for building dynamically extensible systems like those made possible by the OSGi framework for Java. This paper presents the results of an effort to create an OSGi-like service platform for the .NET platform.