Update: added .NET 8

Introduction

In this post I’m going to talk about a few gotchas with the .NET Core’s built-in inversion of control (IoC) / service provider (SP) / dependency injection (DI) library. It is made available as the Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection NuGet package.

I wrote another post some time ago, but this one supersedes it, in many ways.

Extension Methods

The single method exposed by the IServiceProvider interface, GetService, is not strongly typed. If you add a using statement for Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection, you’ll get a few ones that are:

• GetRequiredService<T>: tries to retrieve a service that is registered under the type of the generic template parameter and throws an exception if one cannot be found; if it is, it is cast to the template parameter;
• GetService<T>: retrieves a service and casts it to the template parameter; if no service is found, null is returned;
• GetServices<T>: returns all services registered as the template parameter type, cast appropriately; it is the same as calling GetService<IEnumerable<T>>.

Using a Different Service Provider

You are not forced to use the built-in service provider; you can use anyone you like, as long as it exposes an IServiceProvider implementation. You just need to return this implementation from the ConfigureServices method (from early versions of ASP.NET Core), which normally does not return anything:

public IServiceProvider ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    //return an implementation of IServiceProvider
}

Why would you want to do that, you may ask? Well, there are service providers out there that offer much more interesting features than Microsoft’s (for example, more lifetimes), and this has a reason: Microsoft kept his simple on purpose.

Multiple Registrations

You may not have realized that you can register any number of implementations for a given service, even with different lifetimes:

services.AddTransient<IService, ServiceA>();
services.AddScoped<IService, ServiceB>();

So, what happens when you ask for an implementation for IService? Well, you get the last one registered, in this case, ServiceB. However, you can ask for all the implementations, if you call GetServices<T> or GetService<IEnumerable<T>>.

Registration Factories

You can specify how a service implementation is constructed when you register a service, and it can depend upon other services that are also registered in the service provider:

services.AddTransient<IService>(sp => new ServiceImpl(sp.GetRequiredService<IOtherService>));

Don’t worry about registration order: IOtherService will only be required once IService is retrieved.

Lifetime Dependencies

You cannot have a Singleton registration depend upon a Scoped service. This makes sense, if you think about it, as a singleton has a much longer lifetime than a scoped service.

Nested Scopes

You can create nested scopes at any time and retrieve services from them. If you are using the extension methods in the Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection namespace, it’s as easy as this:

using (var scope = serviceProvider.CreateScope())
{
    var svc = scope.ServiceProvider.GetRequiredService<IService>();
}

The CreateScope method comes from the IServiceScopeFactory implementation that is registered automatically by the dependency injection implementation. See next for implications of this.

Why is this needed? Because of lifetime dependencies: using this approach you can instantiate a service marked as a singleton that takes as a parameter a scoped one, inside a scope.

Dispose Pattern

All services instantiated using the Scoped or Transient lifetimes that implement the IDisposable interface will have their Dispose methods called at the end of the request – or the nested scope (when it is disposed). The root service provider is only disposed with the app itself.

Scope Validation

The built-in service provider validates the registrations so that a singleton does not depend on a scoped registration. This has the effect of preventing retrieving services in the Configure method, through IApplicationBuilder.ApplicationServices, that are not transient or singletons.

If, however, you think you know what you’re doing, you can bypass this validation:

public IServiceProvider ConfigureServices(IServiceCollection services)
{
    //add services
    return services.BuildServiceProvider(validateScopes: false);
}

As I said before, the other alternative is creating a scope and instantiating your singleton service inside the scope. This will always work.

Injecting Services

ASP.NET Core only supports constructor injection:

public HomeController(IService svc)
{
}

and parameter:

public IActionResult Index([FromServices] IService svc)
{
}

inheritance, but not property, in controllers and Razor Pages. You can achieve that through actions or conventions. Another option is to use the Service Locator pattern.

Service Locator

You can retrieve any registered services from HttpContext.RequestServices, so whenever you have a reference to an HttpContext, you’re good. From the Configure method, you can also retrieve services from IApplicationBuilder.ApplicationServices, but not scoped ones (read the previous topics). However, it is generally accepted that you should prefer constructor or parameter injection over the Service Locator approach. It does not work with .NET Core/.NET 5 onwards.

.NET 8

.NET 8 introduced keyed (or named) registrations, which means you can have multiple services registered for the same type, but with different names. I talk about it here.

Conclusion

Although the service provider that comes with .NET Core is OK for most scenarios, it is clearly insufficient for a number of others. These include:

• Other lifetimes, such as, per resolve-context, per thread, etc;
• Property injection;
• Lazy<T> support;
• Automatic discovery and configuration of services, like Scrutor;
• Child containers.

You should consider a more featured DI library, and there are many out there, if you need any of these.