Dependency Resolution in ASP.NET MVC3/4 with Ninject

The topic for this post is setting up the Ninject Inversion of Control (IoC) container in your ASP.NET MVC3/4 applications. I'm assuming the reader has familiarity with the following concepts:

Programming to an interface (or contract)
The IoC programming technique
Dependency injection
IoC containers

The intention is for this post to serve as a useful reference for ASP.NET MVC developers who want to get an IoC container (specifically Ninject) up and running swiftly with the MVC framework.

When working on a new MVC project, one of my first steps usually involves setting up an IoC container. I've typically used Ninject as my IoC container due to its ease of setup and intuitive fluent API. As of ASP.NET MVC3, there is the option of using the Ninject extension for MVC3 (wrapped up in a NuGet package called Ninject.MVC3). This option is simple to setup and you'll typically have little reason to use another approach. Another option is to write your own implementation of the IDependencyResolver interface. In this scenario, you'll implement this interface (which again is quite simple with Ninject) and then hook your custom resolver into the framework for it to use. In a nutshell, the MVC framework will use your custom IDependencyResolver implementation as a first port of call to resolve any required dependencies.

In this post, we'll go with the former option.

Using the Ninject.MVC3 NuGet Package

As mentioned, the Ninject.MVC3 NuGet package is an easy way to get Ninject up and running in your project. The first step is to get the package installed in your solution. I'm using Visual Studio 2012 so the steps may differ slightly depending on what version of the IDE you're running on. Right click your MVC solution node in Solution Explorer. Select the "Manage NuGet Packages for Solution" option in the context menu.

This will bring up the NuGet package manager dialog. In the top right, you should see a text box with the watermark "Search Online". Type "Ninject" and hit enter. In the middle pane, you'll see the Ninject.MV3 package, select it and click the Install button.

At this point, the NuGet package manager will have done all of the hard work. If you expand the App_Start folder in your solution, you'll find a new file called NinjectWebCommon.cs.

This file contains a static class definition and a number of static methods. The methods that you're interested in are the CreateKernal and the RegisterServices methods. If you have had experience with Ninject in the past, then you'll be at home with what the CreateKernal method is doing. It creates an instance of the StandardKernal (the default implementation of Ninjects IKernal interface). The StandardKernel is the class you'll use to map (or in Ninject terminology "bind") interfaces to the implementations that you want to use. This is done by using the generic methods Bind and To on the kernel object, where you pass your interface and implementation, respectively, as type parameters. You'll notice that the CreateKernal method makes a call to a method named RegisterServices. This is the method where you'll register your bindings with Ninject.

private static void RegisterServices(IKernel kernel)
{
    // Register your ninject bindings here!
}

Now that Ninject is setup in the project, we'll try and inject a dependency through a controller constructor. In this example, imagine you have a simple logging interface, defined as:

public interface ILogService
{
    void Log(string message);
}

We then have an implementation of this interface:

public class DebugLogService : ILogService
{
    public void Log(string message)
    {
        System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(message);
    }
}

Imagine further that we now wanted various actions in our HomeController to log to the debug output. With dependency injection, one way to inject our DebugLogService implementation into our HomeController would be through the constructor - as follows:

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    private readonly ILogService _logService;

    public HomeController(ILogService logService)
    {
        _logService = logService;
    }

    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        _logService.Log(
            string.Format("Index() called at {0}", 
                DateTime.Now));

        return View();
    }
}

If you're following the steps and you now run your web application, you'll get a runtime exception stating that there was an error activating ILogService. This is good, as it tells you that Ninject tried to create an instance of the HomeController, but failed in doing so because the HomeController has no default constructor. The constructor that it does have, however, has one required parameter (logService) that Ninject has no type bindings for. We'll now go back to the static RegisterServices method in the NinjectWebCommon class and add the binding as shown below:

private static void RegisterServices(IKernel kernel)
{
    kernel.Bind&lt;ILogService&gt;().To&lt;DebugLogService&gt;();
}

If you now run the application, you'll find that the HomeController is successfully being instantiated with Ninject passing an instance of the DebugLogService class through to the constructor. You can verify this by looking at the output window for the log entry.

And that's it - you'll now follow this pattern for registering your bindings in the RegisterServices method and programming to your interfaces for which you have registered bindings. As all of your bindings are registered in a single location, swapping out your implementations with other implementations is an easy job. We can now easily switch all logging to a file by writing a new FileLogService (that implements ILogService) and then bind this to the ILogService in the RegisterServices method.

Muhammad Rizwan

Dependency Resolution in ASP.NET MVC3/4 with Ninject