Andrew Stopford's Weblog

The ObjectBuilder inside The Microsoft CAB & Enterprise Application Library is another example of a Dependency Injection framework. Unfortunately Object Builder is not well documented.

I would strongly recommend StructureMap.  It is another open-source dependency injection library, and it's available for .Net 1.1 & 2.0 (with generics).  It uses attributes or xml for the mapping meta-data, and it's a cinch to use.

Just google "StructureMap" for all the details.  There are several people who have blogged examples of it.

Spring.net offers some cool functionality. However, the framework lacks a loot of the "killer" features the java version has. You should def play arround with it if you can

I've had problems wiring up runtime dependencies with spring.  If I have to wire up the dependencies based on data provided by the user at runtime, I'm still falling back to coding it myself.  Spring is better for static dependencies.

That being said, the XML file is unwieldy and isn't typesafe.  After adding only a few 10's of objects, I had to break it up into multiple files and even then it was hard to manage.  The format is not information dense, so you have to look at sceen upon screen upon screen of verbose XML to have any kind of a clue as to what's going on.  That's a big problem.

The concepts behind central configuration and IoC are fantastic, but I'm not sold on Spring's implementation of it myself.  

These days, I follow IoC religiously, but use a simple runtime loaded Python or Boo script to wire everything together.  I much prefer this to the current iteration of Spring.  The scripts are turing complete and information dense, but can also be as simple as a config file.  The only drawback is loss of compile time safety, but that is a reasonable tradeoff when you want to configure things more readily at runtime.  Besides, if you want the compile time safety you can always write an assembly in C# that does the same and load it into it's own app domain. Best of both worlds, and no XML anywhere.  :)

Bryan

I'd recommend Castle Windsor, obviously ;-)

Bryan, I didn't get your requirements, and neither your proposal. Aside from that, boo is statically compiled. Anyway, feel free to contact me and I'll try to see if Castle is able to fulfill this kind of requirements and if not, put it on the road map.

Hi,

We started working on a intial support for WPF.

Check it out :

http://forum.springframework.net/showthread.php?t=985

Bruno