If you recall many moons ago I posted a
series of articles on the
Castle Project's IOC Container "Windsor" teaching the fundamentals of IoC with a practical bent - lots of people liked them, and I still get feedback every now and then from people starting to use windsor and finding them useful.
At any rate
Michael McGuire was once such person who read those tutorials a year or so ago and has now started a series of his own - mirroring my castle container tutorials but with the P&P
Unity container instead - you can find it
here.
As someone who has not given Unity much more then a brief skim it's a nice way to quickly get up to speed on some of the key differences.
So far after reading a couple of articles I've learnt.
- You need to implement your own type converters for things like arrays or dictionaries in configuration.
- Configuration syntax is not particularly human-friendly, obviously designed for management via a tool - requiring the entry of full types all over the spot like "Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration.TypeInjectionElement, Microsoft.Practices.Unity.Configuration" - just to register a component!
- Default lifestyle is transient... hmmm.. personally I think singleton is more-often the norm for me when writing applications, but it really depends on how the container is being used/abused I guess.
- Support for multiple configurations looks a little more baked in - but this is trivial stuff to implement in most containers.
I'll be interested to see how decorator chains etc. are implemented in Unity.
Good work Michael.