So I see more people rewriting my container tutorials lately...

First we have the unity tutorials - as covered by Michael McGuire... which I mentioned a while back.

Now we have the binsor tutorials which have sprung up lately - from ruprict covering the same concepts, but with Binsor syntax - which is quite handy for those that are boo-inclined!

I also believe a set of Ninject tutorials are being written by Simone Chiaretta (codeclimber) in his spare time as well (and who is not jealous of Ninject's website! ;o)

It's encouraging to see interest still growing in IoC on the .Net Framework.

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.

About to run off to a meeting... so I'll make this quick.

Just read an interesting post by Donald Belcham on Refactoring Analysis with the help of nDepend... he's gone through the process of moving from .Net 1.1 to 2.0, then introducing interface based code, breaking classes apart to ensure they're enforcing the principle of single responsibility, moving to injecting dependencies, rolling his own primitive Inversion of Control container and finally employing the Castle Project's windsor container instead.

It pays to know a little bit about nDepend of course to understand the Abstractness vs Relational Cohesion figures... either take a look at the nDepend site, or maybe have a listen to the .Net Rocks podcast earlier this year which covered the same topic.

I'm not sure the figures actually answer questions so much as they ask them ... but it's interesting to see how much impact his first two rounds of refactoring had on the results.

I wonder how the figures would've come out had he executed his refactoring in a different order...  maybe DI first, then breaking the classes up based on responsibility, IoC and then finally introducing interfaces... hmmm