A while ago, I joined the ranks of those whose favorite new container became Autofac. Why do I like it? it’s FAST, easy to use, and very powerful due to it’s functional nature. You might say I am biased because the guy who wrote it was on my team, but anyway…

I am exited to hear that Nick has a new blog and is at it again and well on his way to the next version. Yes folks, Autofac 2 is coming!

If you head over to Google Code, you’ll see a lot of cool stuff coming in version 2. My favorite feature is below, ripped from the wiki.  If our new PartCreator<T> was reading this it would be seriously jealous!

When one component needs to dynamically create instances of another, it can take a dependency on a delegate that returns the type of component it requires:

class UsesServer
{
  Func<IServerConnection> _connectionFactory;

  public UsesServer(Func<IServerConnection> connectionFactory)
  {
    _connectionFactory = connectionFactory;
  }

  public void OnNewWork()
  {
    IServerConnection connection = _connectionFactory();
    // ...
  }
}

No explicit configuration is required to use this feature:

builder.RegisterType<FtpConnection>().As<IServerConnection>();
builder.RegisterType<UsesServer>();

By registering IServerConnection, Autofac 2 will automatically inject delegates that return type IServerConnection.

If you are gaga over Autofac, go check it out. If not, you should be!