Is IDependencyResolver an anti-pattern?

c# asp.net-mvc dependency-injection service-locator
michelpm picture michelpm · Apr 13, 2011 · Viewed 11.4k times · Source

I am designing some architectural changes into a legacy ASP.NET application. I prototyped some classes for dependency resolution that mimic the ASP.NET MVC's IDependencyResolver. I won't post because it is pretty much the same interface, but in other natural language.

I figured out it might be considered Service Location, which in turn is usually (not fully in some cases) condemned in favor of Dependency Injection. Nevertheless, I couldn't find any recommendation against the use of the ASP.NET MVC's dependency resolution implementation.

Is the ASP.NET MVC's IDependencyResolver considered an anti-pattern? Is it a bad thing?

Answer

Mark Seemann picture Mark Seemann · Apr 13, 2011

If you look at the signature you will see that it's just a Service Locator with another name. Service Locator is an anti-pattern and I consider the relationship transitive, so I consider IDependencyResolver an anti-pattern.

Apart from that, the interface is also broken because it has no Release method.

Related questions

How to create dependency injection for ASP.NET MVC 5?

Creating Dependency Injection with ASP.NET Core is fairly easy. The documentation explains it very well here and this guy has a killer video to explain it. However, I want to do the same thing with my ASP.NET MVC 5 …

Read More
Injecting dependencies into ASP.NET MVC 3 action filters. What's wrong with this approach?

Here's the setup. Say I have some action filter that needs an instance of a service: public interface IMyService { void DoSomething(); } public class MyService : IMyService { public void DoSomething(){} } I then have an ActionFilter that needs an instance of that service: …

Read More
Entity Framework : Change connection string at runtime

Assuming there is an ASP.NET MVC application that uses Entity Framework 6 with code-first approach and StructureMap as IoC. Also It uses Unit Of Work pattern. Here are the codes : Domain Class     public class Product     {         public int Id { get; set; }         …

Read More