Last week I wrote about my need for Dependency Injection for the Compact Framework. Many DI frameworks do not support the Compact Framework, so I identified four options:
- Don't use IoC and dependency injection
- Continue to "roll-my-own" dependency injection tool
- Pray that Jeremy Miller ports StructureMap to the Compact Framework
- Use Ninject
Well, there is a fifth option that I hadn't considered: finding an open source project that does what I need. Germán Schuager pointed me to a project he created on Google Code called Compact Container. It is lightweight, clean and simple. After reviewing Germán's code, I found that it would support most of my needs, short of a couple of nice-to-have features.
- Marking the injectable constructor with an attribute
- Setting a default object life cycle for a container (rather than having to pass in the life cycle every time a type is registered with the container)
- Ability to resolve concrete types that have not yet been registered with the container
In the spirit of open-source, I created the necessary code and sent it back to Germán for inclusion in the project. As of this posting, he's included the constructor attribution feature in the source repository, and hopefully he'll also add the other features as well.
My struggle with Ninject came down to the fact that it operates in a fashion quite distinct from other DI frameworks. I must admit that the Ninject DSL is quite appealing, but certain things that I'm comfortable doing with StructureMap are difficult if not impossible to attain using Ninject without creating a bunch of direct dependencies on the Ninject assemblies. So it looks like Compact Container is the winner at this point. We'll see if it sticks.
Tags: agile, ioc, s.o.l.i.d., compact framework, dependency injection