I just committed the core of a simple dependency injection container to a standalone assembly, Sasa.IoC. The interface is pretty straightforward:

public static class Dependency { // static, type-indexed operations public static T Resolve<T>(); public static void Register<T>(Func<T> create) public static void Register<TInterface, TRegistrant>() where TRegistrant : TInterface, new() // dynamic, runtime type operations public static object Resolve(Type registrant); public static void Register(Type publicInterface, Type registrant, params Type[] dependencies) }

If you were ever curious about IoC, the Dependency class is only about 100 lines of code. You can even skip the dynamic operations and it's only ~50 lines of code. The dynamic operations then just use reflection to invoke the typed operations.

Dependency uses static generic fields, so resolution is pretty much just a field access + invoking a delegate. The reason for this speed and simplicity is that it's very light on features, like lifetime management, instance sharing, etc. It's really just the core for dependency injection.

Still, it gets you far because the constructor delegate is entirely user-specified. You can actually build features like lifetime management on top of this core by supplying an appropriate delegate to Register<T>.

For instance, singleton dependencies would look like:

IFoo singleton = null; Dependency.Register<IFoo>( () => singleton ?? (singleton = new Foo()));

HTTP request-scoped instances would look something like:

Dependency.Register<IFoo>( () => HttpContext.Current.Items["IFoo"] ?? (HttpContext.Current.Items["IFoo"] = new Foo()) as IFoo);

A thread-local singleton would look something like:

public static class Local { [ThreadStatic] internal IFoo instance; } ... Dependency.Register<IFoo>( () => Local.instance ?? (Local.instance = new Foo()));

Instance resolution with sharing is something like:

public static class Instances { internal Dictionary<Type, object> cache = new Dictionary<Type, object>(); internal Func<T> Memoize(Func<T> create) { T value; return cache.TryGetValue(typeof(T), out value) ? value : cache[typeof(T)] = create(); } } ... Dependency.Register<IFoo>(Instances.Memoize(() => new Foo()));

This container doesn't handle cleanup though, so the thread-local example depends on the client to properly dispose of the thread-local IFoo instance. AutoFac IoC claims to handle disposal of all disposable instances, so I'm reading up a little on how that's done.

This approach seems to handle most common scenarios, but there are no doubt some limitations. Still, it's a good introduction for those curious about IoC implementation.