Can someone explain Microsoft Unity?

Question

I've been reading the articles on MSDN about Unity (Dependency Injection, Inversion of Control), but I think I need it explained in simple terms (or simple examples). I'm familiar with the MVPC pattern (we use it here), but I just can't really grasp this Unity thing yet, and I think it's the next step in our application design.

Answer 1

Unity is just an IoC "container". Google StructureMap and try it out instead. A bit easier to grok, I think, when the IoC stuff is new to you.

Basically, if you understand IoC then you understand that what you're doing is inverting the control for when an object gets created.

Without IoC:

public class MyClass
{
   IMyService _myService; 

   public MyClass()
   {
      _myService = new SomeConcreteService();    
   }
}

With IoC container:

public class MyClass
{
   IMyService _myService; 

   public MyClass(IMyService myService)
   {
      _myService = myService;    
   }
}

Without IoC, your class that relies on the IMyService has to new-up a concrete version of the service to use. And that is bad for a number of reasons (you've coupled your class to a specific concrete version of the IMyService, you can't unit test it easily, you can't change it easily, etc.)

With an IoC container you "configure" the container to resolve those dependencies for you. So with a constructor-based injection scheme, you just pass the interface to the IMyService dependency into the constructor. When you create the MyClass with your container, your container will resolve the IMyService dependency for you.

Using StructureMap, configuring the container looks like this:

StructureMapConfiguration.ForRequestedType<MyClass>().TheDefaultIsConcreteType<MyClass>();
StructureMapConfiguration.ForRequestedType<IMyService>().TheDefaultIsConcreteType<SomeConcreteService>();

So what you've done is told the container, "When someone requests the IMyService, give them a copy of the SomeConcreteService." And you've also specified that when someone asks for a MyClass, they get a concrete MyClass.

That's all an IoC container really does. They can do more, but that's the thrust of it - they resolve dependencies for you, so you don't have to (and you don't have to use the "new" keyword throughout your code).

Final step: when you create your MyClass, you would do this:

var myClass = ObjectFactory.GetInstance<MyClass>();

Hope that helps. Feel free to e-mail me.