Enterprise Library 3.0

Validation Application Block and Unity Screencast - Enterprise Library 4.0

Dave Hayden — Tue, 27 May 2008 21:31:00 GMT

PnPGuidance screencast showing how to use the Validation Application Block with Unity in Enterprise Library 4.0. Hope it helps :)

EntLib 4.0 Data Access Application Block and Unity Screencast

Dave Hayden — Fri, 23 May 2008 00:37:00 GMT

The first screencast on Enterprise Library 4.0, which covers using the Data Access Application Block with Unity.

Enterprise Library 4.0 Data Access Application Block ( DAAB ) and Unity IoC Tutorial - DataAccessBlockExtension

Dave Hayden — Mon, 19 May 2008 00:19:00 GMT

Quick tutorial on how to get the Enterprise Library 4.0 Data Access Application Block to work with Unity.

Download Enterprise Library 4.0 for Visual Studio 2008 and .NET 3.5 - Unity IoC - Enterprise Library Tutorials

Dave Hayden — Fri, 16 May 2008 23:34:00 GMT

Congratulations to the Enterprise Library Team for their release of Enterprise Library 4.0. A few enhancements and bug fixes in this release, but most importantly it comes with Unity IoC Integration.

Unity 1.0 Released - Patterns & Practices IoC Container

Dave Hayden — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:33:00 GMT

Unity 1.0 Released - Patterns & Practices IoC Container

by David Hayden, Florida ASP.NET Developer

Microsoft Patterns & Practices Released Unity 1.0 today. Unity is an Inversion of Control ( IoC ) Container and Dependency Injection Tool from Microsoft Patterns & Practices that uses ObjectBuilder 2.0 as its dependency injection engine.

You can learn more about Unity by watching the following screencasts:

You can also read some tutorials on using Unity:

Download Unity.

Enterprise Library 4.0 Download of March 2008 CTP Available

Dave Hayden — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 20:40:00 GMT

Enterprise Library 4.0 Download of March 2008 CTP Available

by David Hayden, Florida ASP.NET Developer Filed: Enterprise Library

Enterprise Library 4.0 Download is available for the March 2008 CTP. This is the first and possibly only CTP for Enterprise Library 4.0.

It includes support for Partially Trusted Callers which is great news when you are building ASP.NET Web Applications on a shared host provider using Partial Trust. There are also apparently numerous enahancements to a number of the Enterprise Library 4.0 Application Blocks, including the Caching Application Block, Exception Handling Application Block, Logging Application Block, and Validation Application Block.

There is no Unity IoC Support in the March CTP. You will be able to use Unity to configure the application blocks in Enterprise Library 4.0 when it is officially released.

Go to the CodePlex Site

Unity Dependency Injection and Open Generic Types

Dave Hayden — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:27:00 GMT

Unity Dependency Injection and Open Generic Types

Author: David Hayden, Florida .NET Developer

I mentioned on PnPGuidance that there is a new drop of Unity:

Unity March 24 Update: Mapping of Generic Types - Injection Configuration - Performance Improvements

For those of you unfamiliar with Unity, the Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection from Microsoft Patterns & Practices.

One of the new features in this recent drop of Unity is the support for open Generic Types. Hence, I can register a type of IRepository that maps to Respository like this:

IUnityContainer container = new UnityContainer();
container.RegisterType(typeof(IRepository<>), typeof(Repository<>));

and then resolve a type of say IRepository as such from the UnityContainer:

IRepository<Customer> customerRepository =
    container.Resolve<IRepository<Customer>>();

For those of you using Castle Windsor, you can of course do the same thing. One can register the same types in a WindsorContainer:

IWindsorContainer container = new WindsorContainer();
container.AddComponent("Repository",typeof(IRepository<>),
                                      typeof(Repository<>));

and then resolve a type of IRepository from the WindsorContainer via

IRepository<Customer> customerRepository =
    container.Resolve<IRepository<Customer>>();

For more information on Unity, you can watch my Unity IoC Screencast.

Hope this helps.

Dave

News Feed: http://www.davidhayden.com/

Unity and Enterprise Library 4.0 and Prism ... OH MY!

Dave Hayden — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:44:00 GMT

Unity and Enterprise Library 4.0 and Prism ... OH MY!

by David Hayden, Florida ASP.NET Developer

Unity and Enterprise Library 4.0

Grigori just announced the release plans for Unity 1.0 and Enterprise Library 4.0.

The big day is March 15th, when Unity will apparently be released as 1.0 and we will see the first Enterprise Library 4.0 CTP.

Then by May 1 we will see the release of Enterprise Libary 4.0 with full Unity Integration.

Boy is that quick! Agile does work :)

Prism on CodePlex

Prism is a set of assets for developing Composite WPF applications. Prism includes a reference implementation, reusable library code and pattern guidance. It is being created by the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Team and Prism now has a home on CodePlex with some source code spikes.

News Feed: http://www.davidhayden.com/

Simple Web Application Block Gets Unity Dependency Injection Support - Abstractions Are Good!

Dave Hayden — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 12:41:00 GMT

Simple Web Application Block Gets Unity Dependency Injection Support

by David Hayden, Florida ASP.NET Developer

So with all this talk about the Unity Dependency Injection Container you are probably wondering if Unity will be supported in the next version of the Web Client Software Factory, assuming there is a next version. Okay, my mistake, first you are probably wondering when the Web Client Guidance Bundle will work in Visual Studio 2008, and then you are wondering about Unity Support :)

Alright, I am teasing I know, but the truth is that 3rd party dependencies stink when developing applications. They are inevitable, but they stink. And one of my concerns is being too dependent on 3rd party libraries, like the Composite Web Application Block, Enterprise Library, and ObjectBuilder.

One of the first things I did when the Composite Web Application Block came out is to create my own version, the Simple Web Application Block. This is the Composite Web Application Block without dependencies on Enterprise Library and ObjectBuilder. I replaced ObjectBuilder with my favorite IoC, Castle Windsor, and added StructureMap support as well to make sure I indeed had the ability to switch out IoC Containers.

I have a few posts here about the Simple Web Application Block:

So you can probably guess what has been on my mind lately. Let's add Unity Support! All I need to do is create a simple adapter for Unity and all should be fine. About 1 hour later Unity now works with the Simple Web Application Block. No waiting!

Now just so you know, this wasn't all about playing ( only 90% ). I have a client right now where we are using the Simple Web Application Block and they wanted to make sure I could move to Unity when it comes out. Of course, we can...

Unity Tutorials

Author: David Hayden, Florida Web Developer

ASP.NET MVC Framework and Unity Dependency Injection Container Part II

Dave Hayden — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 10:34:00 GMT

ASP.NET MVC Framework and Unity Dependency Injection Container Part II

by David Hayden, Microsoft MVP C#

Update 3/7/2008: Added Unity IoC and ASP.NET MVC Framework - Dependency Injection of Controllers

Update 2/19/2008: Added Unity IoC Dependency Injection and ASP.NET Model-View-Presenter

Update 2/22/2008: Added Unity Dependency Injection IoC Screencast

I received a few emails on showing more detail on how I am using the ASP.NET MVC Framework with the Unity Dependency Injection Container. I am still deciding the best way to integrate the various IoC Containers with the ASP.NET MVC Framework, but this time I used the same approach as the Windsor Example in MVCContrib.

The HttpApplication Class is responsible for holding the Unity Container and providing access to it using an IContainerAccessor Interface:

public class Global : HttpApplication, IContainerAccessor
{
    private static UnityContainer _container;

    public static IUnityContainer Container
    {
        get { return _container; }
    }

    IUnityContainer IContainerAccessor.Container
    {
        get { return Container; }
    }

    protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        InitializeContainer();
        ControllerBuilder.Current.
            SetDefaultControllerFactory(
                    typeof(CustomControllerFactory));
    }

    private void InitializeContainer()
    {
        if (_container == null)
            _container = new UnityContainer();
            
        // For Sample Only...
        _container.RegisterType<INewsService, NewsService>();
    }
}

As mentioned in the previous post, Unity Dependency Injection Container and ASP.NET MVC Framework, I am not adding any Controller Classes to the Unity Container. You don't need to with Unity. It will create classes even if they are not in the container.

I am specifying my custom IControllerFactory, CustomControllerFactory, and I am registering the NewsService that will be injected into my HomeController.

As mentioned in the previous post, my CustomControllerFactory is as follows:

public class CustomControllerFactory : IControllerFactory
{
    public IController CreateController
            (RequestContext context, Type controllerType)
    {
        IContainerAccessor containerAccessor =
            context.HttpContext.ApplicationInstance
                 as IContainerAccessor;

        return containerAccessor.Container.Resolve(controllerType)
            as IController;
    }
}

It may look a little confusing looking at it like this, because I am accessing the UnityContainer through a IContainerAccessor Interface and the Container Property on that interface. All I am doing is using the following method on the UnityContainer API:

UnityContainer.Resolve(Type t)

that will create the HomeController Class and add any dependencies to it.

Using the Property Setter Injection Mechanism mentioned in the previous post, since the HomeController has a [Dependency] Attribute on the NewsService Property:

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    [Dependency]
    public INewsService NewsService { get; set; }

    [ControllerAction]
    public void Index()
    {
        List<News> currentNews = NewsService.GetNews();
        RenderView("Index", currentNews);
    }
}

Unity will inject the NewsService we registered before into the HomeController. As mentioned above, we registered the NewsService in the InitializeContainer Method just for this sample -

private void InitializeContainer()
{
    if (_container == null)
        _container = new UnityContainer();
        
    // For Sample Only...
    _container.RegisterType<INewsService, NewsService>();
}

Note that if you wanted to register the NewsService as a Singleton, you could register it as follows:

_container
    .RegisterType<INewsService, NewsService>
       (new ContainerControlledLifetimeManager());

I hope that clarifies how I used Unity with the ASP.NET MVC Framework. This is just one way that I modeled after the Windsor Example in the MVCContrib.

Recent ASP.NET MVC Tutorials:

Author: David Hayden, Microsoft MVP C#

Site: http://www.davidhayden.com/