Introducing EffectiveIoC

Last week I tweeted a few times about writing an IoC container in less than 60 lines of code. I also blogged about how I thought the average IoC container was overly complex and didn't promote DI-friendliness.

Well, EffectiveIoC is the result of that short spike. The core ended up being about 60 lines of code (supported type mappings—including open and closed generics—and app.config mappings). I felt a minimum viable IoC container needed a little more than that, so I've also included programmatic configuration and support for instances (effectively singletons). I've also thrown in the ability to map an action to a type to do whatever you want when the type is resolved. Without all the friendly API, it works out to be about 80-90 lines of code.

Why?

Well, the project page sums this up nicely. For the most part, I wanted something that promoted DI-friendly design—which, from my point of view, is constructor injection. So, EffectiveIoC is very simple. It supports mapping one type to another (the from type must be assignable to the to type) and registering of instances by name (key). Registering type mappings can be done in app.config:

or in code:

And type instances can be resolved like this:

Instances can also be registered. In config this can be done like this:

Or in code, like this:

Instances can be resolved by name as follows:

For more information and to view the source, see the GitHub project site: https://github.com/peteraritchie/effectiveioc