Looking at Ninject

Not to be too Microsoft-centric, I decided to look at the DI container Ninject, which has recently been released by Nate Kohari. After all, if we write our components correctly (POCOs), then swapping out containers should be a trivial exercise.

I looked at the docs on Ninject's constructor injection and found the following:

You also have the option to leave off the [Inject] attribute completely. This can help if you don't have access to the source code of a class, but you still want to inject dependencies into it. Here's the logic Ninject follows to choose which constructor to call, if none have an [Inject] attribute:

1. If the type only has a single constructor, Ninject will call it.
2. If the type has more than one constructor, but has a default (parameterless) constructor available, Ninject will call it. (This also applies to types that have no explicit constructors defined.)

I think that's a deal-breaker. Adding Attributes to my classes is not an option, because I want to maintain container-independency. In order to work correctly with constructor-injection, I need the container to call the container with as many parameters as it can satisfy. I will often have a parameterless constructor in my component to supply default values for the object for legacy code which is not using a container.

I'll take another look at Ninject if the constructor-injection strategy changes. The site has really sweet icons, by the way. Here's a sample: